It was a winter afternoon in Juneau, Alaska, more temperate than most who live in the Lower 48 would imagine, but cold enough for frozen lakes and plenty of snow. A day of work done, Alaskan Brewing Company co-founder Marcy Larson headed out on cross-country skis with her dog, Jasmine, at her side. They were bound for Mendenhall Glacier when they came across Romeo, a black wolf well known to local residents. “People let their dogs play with him,” Larson said, remembering the afternoon. “In my mind that’s a mistake. Then he’s not a wolf anymore.” Romeo trotted toward Jasmine, signaling it was time to romp. Resolved that they shouldn’t, Larson commanded Jasmine to keep moving.
When the pair reached the cliffs near the base of the glacier, Jasmine was the first to spot a mountain goat about 30 feet above them. They paused again. “We left the goat behind and went skiing,” Larson said. “But later I thought, where else can you ski to the base of a glacier, run into a black wolf and then a mountain goat?”
The balance—and sometimes tension—between man and wilderness is evident everywhere in Alaska, including within the beers of Alaskan Brewing.
The brewery makes several beers that literally taste of the region. Its fragrant Alaskan Winter Ale is brewed with Sitka spruce tips collected by the 500 residents of nearby Gustavus, the gateway to Glacier Bay National Park. Alaskan Smoked Porter is made with malt smoked over alder wood, the only true hardwood in Southeast Alaska, used for centuries by the native Tlingit to smoke fish. Before Geoff Larson brewed the first batch for release in 1989, Marcy Larson found references in local history books to a nineteenth century porter made with malts kilned nearby over wood (almost surely alder) fire.
The ingredients are traditional and the flavors familiar. But there is something else about these and other beers from Alaskan Brewing. They come from a particular place, and they taste of that place. Not every beer that might be called local tastes of a place, but it is hard for a beer to taste of a place and not be somehow local.
Brewers routinely learn how to remove the taste of a particular place from a beer or substitute elements of another by chemically altering their water to mimic that of another region, importing hops and malt from other countries and hemispheres, or acquiring a specific yeast strain to ferment their beer. That knowledge allows them to make beer that tastes very much the same one batch after another, even though they are working with agricultural products.
There are many things brewers can do; there may be fewer they choose to do. Amy Trubek nicely summarized this decision-making process with the final words of The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir: “[T]he taste of place exists, as long as it matters.”
It is impossible to discuss the role of place without including the notion of terroir, perhaps unfortunately, since that word has become so closely associated with wine. Even within that singular context the concept is not well understood. A rather lengthy entry in The Oxford Companion to Wine begins: “[T]erroir, much discussed term for the local natural environment of any viticultural site. No precise English equivalent exists for this quintessentially French term and concept” (Robinson 2006, 693). Why the term is much discussed is more apparent in The Science of Wine (Goode 2014, 23). “‘Terroir’ is a concept that is rapidly emerging as the unifying theory of fine wine,” Jamie Goode wrote. “Once almost exclusively the preserve of the Old World, it’s now a talking point in the New World, too. The traditional, Old World definition of terroir is quite a tricky one to tie down, but it can probably be best summed up as the way that the environment of the vineyard shapes the quality of the wine. It’s a local flavor, the possession by a wine of a sense of place or ‘somewhereness.’ That is, a wine from a particular patch of ground expresses characteristics related to the physical environments in which the grapes were grown.”
Randall Grahm, founder of Bonny Doon Vineyard in California, is a well-known advocate of a broader definition. “I hate to reduce things to a sound bite,” he said. “But innovation, experimentation, natural … our story now is that we’re attempting to produce wines with more life force” (Darlington 2001, 258).
Sometimes brewers aren’t comfortable with similar conversations. That is changing as more of them emphasize beer is an agricultural product and ingredients are not simply commodities. They step away from the rather recent truism that farmers make wine and engineers make beer. That certainly wasn’t fact for most of beer’s history.
“Where drinks are grown, they seem a central element of life. When they are uprooted, they can lose context,” Michael Jackson wrote for Slow magazine in 2002. “It was in Britain that a combination of the Protestant work ethic and the world’s first industrial revolution created mass production, placing an ever-increasing distance between the cultivation of raw materials, the brewing of beer, and its consumption. In Britain, there is still a bruised fissure between country and town. The suddenness and brutality of the industrial revolution ripped food and drink from the soil, to the detriment of both.”
That distance has been reduced recently in America, making the broader interpretation of terroir that Trubek presents in Taste of Place particularly relevant. Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, Pierre Larousse’s nineteenth century French dictionary, defines terroir as “the earth considered from the point of view of agriculture.” It describes le goût de terroir as “the flavor or odor of certain locales that are given to its products, particularly with wine,” (Trubek 2008, xv).
Trubek prefers what she calls the “French foodview,” arguing that in France the narrow scientific and broad cultural definitions of terroir are often used simultaneously. “This broader definition of terroir considers place as much as earth. According to this definition, the people involved in making wine, the winemaking tradition of a region, and the local philosophy of flavor are all part of terroir,” she wrote. “Unlike the narrow view of terroir, this humanist point of view is not really quantifiable. Terroir speaks of nature and nature’s influence on flavor and quality, but here the human attributes we bring to ‘nature’ are cultural and sensual rather than objective and scientific,” (Trubek 2008, 69).
She explains that a narrower definition of terroir arose at the beginning of the twentieth century because many turned to an understanding of terroir as a matter of science. Research focused on the grapes, the vines, and the soil. Likewise, science can explain the role place plays in the character of the ingredients used to make beer. For example, although Saaz, Tettnanger, and Spalt Spalter hops are almost genetically identical, they become different in the field, and, as a result, in the glass. The Tettnang region in southeast Germany where Tettnanger hops grow is at a different latitude and higher altitude and receives both more rain and more sunshine than where Saaz and Spalter grow (in the Czech Republic and Bavaria, respectively). In addition, the plants in Tettnang are hung on trellises a meter taller than in other regions and planted closer together. Many of the bines are 80 to 100 years old, compared to 25-year-old plants elsewhere.
In 2002 researchers at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart used DNA fingerprinting to analyze the similarity of Tettnanger hop plants to each other as well as to Spalter and Saaz. The research included several Osvald clones from the Czech Republic. Karel Osvald, who began the Czech breeding program in 1925, feared attempts to increase yield by hybridization would result in loss of the aroma that characterizes Saaz hops. Rather than release hybrids, he selected plants (his clones) with superior agronomic attributes but similar brewing qualities closest to the original Saaz.
All the Osvald Saaz clones studied at Stuttgart could be more clearly distinguished from each other than the original Saaz could from Tettnanger or Spalter. Three of the clones were quite similar to the original Saaz, but Osvald clone 126 was much more like Fuggle, a well-known English variety. Nonetheless, all the Osvald clones, including 126, grown in the Žatek region of the Czech Republic, exhibited similar morphological traits and produced hops brewers consider identical (Fleischer et al. 2004, 218).
Plant geneticist John Henning at the United States Department of Agriculture research facility in Oregon explained the science behind the findings. Environment and epigenetics combine to make hops from a particular area unique. All plant species have methylated DNA, which causes some genes to be “switched on” more easily than others. Differences in soil, day length, temperatures, amount of rainfall, and terrain all may influence the methylation process. The underlying DNA does not change, but the methylation pattern can be different, resulting in differing concentrations of the chemical compounds produced by the plant.
Not every difference need be explained by scientists. Jimmy Mauric, brewmaster at the Spoetzl Brewery in Shiner, Texas, lives on the homestead where he grew up, about a mile and a half from the brewery in which he now works. When the wind blows from the south and he’s sitting on his front porch, he can smell fresh wort, and he explains why Shiner Bock wouldn’t taste the same brewed anywhere else. “You can duplicate the water chemically, but it’s like a seasoned pot,” he said. “Most people have a favorite frying pan that just makes everything taste better. I don’t think you could copy the flavor from our brewing kettles.”
In Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love, Simran Sethi (2015, 5) wrote about finding the stories “of our foods and the way we can better save—and savor—them. In order to do this we have to go deep—to the origin. Every food has an intriguing birthplace and holds flavors directly connected to the place and the people that make them.” Sethi did not care for beer before she set out to learn about it, but ended up devoting a substantial section of her book to brewing and drinking. “In my youth, I hadn’t wanted to be considered the kind of woman who drank beer,” she wrote. “But that is exactly who I am, and that is exactly who I want to be.”
She is a foodie, and, as Trubek wrote, that word is sometimes used pejoratively by those who consider focusing on ingredients and their origins elitist. “Our foodview is not informed primarily by taste, or by place, but by the ability to purchase a consistent product, or even more generally, a commodity,” she wrote. “Discernment in our commodity culture relies on external information, not personal knowledge: Choices revolve around numbers—cost, rankings, popularity … and if you pay too much attention to what happens in your mouth, you are readily dismissed as a ‘foodie,’” (Trubek 2008, 15).
More people don’t care about terroir, or place, than do. They consider these simply marketing words, often used in conjunction with two other marketing terms: authenticity and traditional. And even those who think these four particular words matter may not agree about their relationship. “Throughout this book I explore the myriad places where the taste of place intersects with the definitions of authenticity,” Trubek wrote. “The uses of authenticity when related to food and drink rest on assumptions about the superiority of traditional practices,” (Trubek, 16).
However, what was traditional in brewing beer in one century was not traditional in another, and what might be authentic in one place may not be in another. Tradition has been central to the American beer revival that Fritz Maytag ignited in 1965, when he bought controlling interest in Anchor Brewing Company. “Mind you, there was no beer in the world more traditional than ours. Pure water, good yeast, malted barley, hops. Period,” he said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2015. “No additives, no chemicals, no nothing. That was a theme we felt strong about. To make old-fashioned beer in a pure, simple way.”
His steam beer may have been old-fashioned but the “pure, simple way” it was made was not. Maytag thought the previous owners had cut corners brewing Anchor Steam and he clearly would not. “I wanted to be holier than the Pope. We were the only brewery in the world that was all stainless steel, all cleaned in place. We were centrifuging the finished beer,” he said. “We were flash pasteurizing the beer. People who knew brewing would see this goofy little building and would come out with their eyes bigger than saucers.” Not everybody’s definition of traditional includes flash pasteurization, but that never became part of the conversation.
Instead, nostalgia has served Anchor well. It recalls the days of the Gold Rush and was what Jackson (2007, 214) described as “the nation’s sole indigenous beer-style.” The Chronicle also asked Mark Carpenter, who went to work at Anchor in 1971, to look 50 years into the future. “I hope it’s not too big. We’re just a wonderful, traditional, hands-on brewery, and I would hope in 50 years we’re still that. There’s no reason we have to go modern,” he said. “I go into a lot of new breweries these days, and they make great beers, but it’s like (they are) working in a miniature version of a large brewery, with closed stainless steel tanks and (hop) pellets or extracts. When I walk into my brewery, there’s an all-copper brewhouse and the guys, not computers, are turning on the steam valves.”
There is a flip side to romanticized memories. Trubek wrote that French efforts to codify terroir contributed “to a nostalgia for the past and difficulties in imagining the future.” Moonlight Brewing founder Brian Hunt laments that brewers may do the same. He complains that they fail to explore brewing alternatives when they only follow recipes from other times and places. An essay he wrote several years ago, “600 Words About Beer Styles,” illustrates how to avoid that trap. He imagined a scenario in which barley would have been native to North America rather than the Middle East, and that beer would have instead originated in America.
“Columbus would have sailed back to Europe with barley seeds and news of beer as a revolutionary new beverage, a welcome change from cider, wine, and mead,” he wrote. “Imagine, then, that brewers on the New World continents would have been brewing beer with barley for thousands of years and today wouldn’t merely be copying beer styles from thousands of miles away in Europe. Imagine just in North America how many indigenous beer styles would have developed that would be completely unlike any we know today.
“Indigenous American beer styles! What a concept! Somewhere in Belgium today, a brewer would be scouring his books for clues as to what made the famous soft beers of Florida, and trying to re-create them.… It could so easily have been reversed like this.”
Hunt did not begin with a blank slate when he started Moonlight Brewing in 1992. He is a 1980 graduate of the University of California at Davis fermentation sciences program, where he worked in Dr. Michael Lewis’ laboratory. Among the field trips he and classmates took was one to New Albion Brewing in Sonoma, where the students posed for a photo with founder Jack McAuliffe.
Doug Muehlman, Lewis’ graduate assistant, took the picture. “I had the sense that something was happening, something fundamental, and I was bearing witness,” said Muehlman, who was vice president in charge of brewing operations at Anheuser-Busch before retiring in 2008. New Albion, like Anchor, was an inspiration for Sierra Nevada Brewing and several thousand breweries that followed. However, Hunt and his classmates mostly went to work at larger breweries or wineries. In Hunt’s case it was Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company in Milwaukee, which would close a year later.
He moved back to California and spent 10 years helping to establish small breweries before he started his own. “It was a frontier,” he said. “That was pretty awesome.” From the outset his beers were not derivative, but while he experimented constantly it wasn’t until 2006 that he decided to make an all-herbal beer. Moonlight’s Artemis included mugwort and bergamot in the recipe. “Oh my god, it offended some people,” he said.
“I realized that I needed to make an herbal beer that tasted like beer, to pave the way for people to make unhopped beers,” he said. That beer is Working for Tips, which he has made with redwood tips every year since 2007. History brought beers made with spruce tips to his attention, but spruce trees are not native to the area around Santa Rosa where he brews Moonlight beers.
“My intention was not to make tree beers, but to make really good beer—relevant beer,” he said. He has since used different varieties of other local trees in various beers. “I don’t try to go make these beers for a novelty. I cannot stand beers that are made for novelty. When I pick an ingredient, it’s not because it’s cool. It’s because it provides a flavor I want.”
What ingredients he might use next is less important than how he will use them. “I want to try making different combinations of things. Kind of what it is like is learning a language,” he said. “What it means to be fluent. When you are learning a language, you have to think about every word. When you are fluent in a language, it flows through you. So think about redwood by itself, this herb on itself, apricot on itself,—but how does it all fit?”
“What I care about is delicious,” he said. “If I can find non-traditional ways of making delicious beer, I’m there.”
He believes drinkers pay attention to relevant beers. “I accept that relevant is subjective. I want to make beers that are relevant to me and that will continue to be relevant,” said Hunt, who turned 59 in 2016. “How many more beers am I going to drink in my life? Twenty barrels’ worth, maybe it was once 40. What is relevant is that it is a finite number. If you drink a crappy beer, that’s one less relevant beer you are going to drink.”
Drawing on the past for inspiration has not kept Jester King Brewery in Texas from also embracing its own geography. The brewery ended up on a farm outside of Austin almost by accident. When Jeffery Stuffings and his brother, Michael Steffing (who changed his name to the way his family originally spelled it long before he realized he’d be going into business with his older brother), started planning the brewery in 2008, they expected to be making Anglo-American type beers, probably in an industrial park within the Austin city limits. In fact, one of their first beers was an India Pale Ale (IPA) that included 15 percent rye in the recipe and three pounds of hops per barrel.
Plans began to change after they received a phone call from a rancher with 220 acres west of town offering them four acres to use. They found a building in Victoria, Texas—a machine shop from the 1920s constructed with Carnegie steel—and hauled it to the farm. They met Ron Extract, the former national sales manager for Shelton Brothers importers, who became a partner and introduced them to mixed fermentations. “Having our eyes opened to the world beyond Saccharomyces, there’s no turning back,” Stuffings said. Before opening the brewery in 2010 they built a mini-coolship, brewed a batch of wort, and set it out in the Hill Country air. There are wineries “here, here, and here,” Stuffings said, pointing in different directions. “We thought there might be some good yeast in the air.”
Not everything worked. They dumped several beers during the first two years. “They were experiments in the true sense of the word,” Extract said. The brewery’s philosophy is based on farmhouse brewing as it existed in southern Belgium and northern France during the last two centuries. “To us, farmhouse brewing is a fundamentally different way of making beer that harnesses the surrounding land to make unique beer with a sense of place,” said Stuffings.
When Garrett Crowell, who had no previous commercial brewing experience, went to work at Jester King in 2012, the brewery took several steps toward fulfilling that vision. Crowell developed the mixed culture that has been used since, and they began to ferment all their beers (except for those spontaneously fermented) with that house culture. Previously, some beers were fermented with pure single strains.
He also began to brew the beers using untreated water from a 750-foot-deep well on the property. At the outset, the brothers collected rainwater (although it doesn’t rain much in the Texas Hill Country) and blended it with well water they softened. The water is so hard that brewers must use soft water to clean the equipment, which nonetheless will have a shorter life than if soft water were used throughout. “If we’re trying to document our surroundings, it makes sense,” Crowell said.
Jester King produced a modest 2,300 barrels of beer in 2015, selling about 85 percent of that at the brewery door. Between 1,200 and 1,500 customers will visit the brewery, which is about a 30-minute drive from downtown Austin, each weekend. Some line up for releases of special beers, but the sprawling grounds themselves are an attraction.
To ensure it remains the same, early in 2016 Jester King bought 58 acres of land surrounding the brewery. “Our decision to purchase the land around us is twofold,” Stuffings wrote for a press release announcing the acquisition. “First, we were afraid that had we done nothing, the land would one day become a residential sub-division. Second, by owning the land, we can soon begin to make Jester King a working farm. It’s no secret that we consider ourselves to be an authentic farmhouse brewery. We make this claim on the label of every bottle of our beer.”
Jester King planted its first crops in the spring of 2016. Along with grains, herbs, and vegetables for brewing, they added a vineyard and an orchard. “If it can be grown, crafted, or fermented using what’s available to us, we seek to do it,” Stuffings wrote. “With time, we seek to make Jester King a leading destination for artisan foods, beverages, goods, and all things fermentation. For instance, we plan on using agriculture to support a farm-to-table restaurant, and livestock to support cheese making and cured meats.”
Crowell talks about seasons, both in terms of what is available to brew with and the environment of the brewery itself, because it is hot in Texas Hill Country much of the year. When temperatures are lower in winter the house yeast culture is less expressive and lactic acidity dominates. “As such, winter ingredients such as beets, herbs, and citrus are used to complement and/or enhance a winter fermentation profile,” he said.
By March, beers fermented in stainless steel tanks finish much faster, and Crowell finds the yeast character more expressive. When the weather is warmer, the temperatures will remain at 78°F or higher throughout fermentation, so he brews more “saison-esque” beers focused on yeast character, rather than acidity. “This is my favorite season to brew, as these beers are so fresh, fluffy, and intensely drinkable,” he said.
When the yeast is expressive, he prefers more subtle peripheral ingredients. “Last summer we brewed a beer with chamomile and refermented it with a small amount of strawberries. To me, neither is explicitly evident, but rather integrated with the profile our mixed culture presents with warmer fermentations,” he said. “Each season tends to present fermentations that are like cuts of meat. Some cuts need only fire, others need chimichurri.”
Crowell is a fan of some breweries whose beers may be wildly variable, such as Brasserie Fantôme. “The more beer I have from Fantôme, the more I’m able to correlate ingredient use to season,” he said. “But also, the fermentation character varies in the seasonal beers Dany Prignon brews there. The fall and winter beers tend to be on the sweeter side, eventually becoming lactic, and the warmer summer/spring beers tend to be drier.”
Jester King’s Dichotomous series includes beers brewed in each season using ingredients available that season (see the recipe for Hibernal Dichotomous on page 302). Which season they are ready to drink in depends on the house culture. Crowell brewed the 2014 batch of Autumnal Dichotomous with butternut squash and acorn squash that was roasted or grilled over old barrel staves. He also added white sage and long pepper. It was brewed in October and released in mid-January. “I’m very inspired by nostalgia, and the smell of burning leaf piles is perhaps my most nostalgic memory of fall. The subtle smoke and spice character in the beer reminds me of those dim-lit autumn afternoons, running through the neighborhood, and the smell in the air,” he said.
Although mixed cultures are the rule in nature (see page 136), that they evolve from one batch to the next clashes with the presumption that brewing must be iterative. “We really accepted the fact we only have some control,” Crowell said. They do see an equilibrium, according to Stuffings. “When (the beer) is fresh the Saccharomyces is more prominent. About three months in the bottle it starts to change. Pretty much like clockwork.”
The yeast character may not always taste the same, but it will taste familiar. “We’re trying to push back against the idea that every beer must taste different,” Extract said. “(They) tend to become more like each other as they age.”
*****
The hike to Hanging Lake near Glenwood Springs in northern Colorado can be crowded, even though the trail is rated moderate to difficult because it is rocky and gains more than 1,000 feet in just over a mile. The hike, like peaches from nearby Palisade, is part of a Colorado mindset, said Zach Coleman, a brewer at TRVE Brewing Company in Denver.
He thought about peaches from Palisade, as well as a beer he might make, as he climbed through the narrow Deadhorse Creek Canyon on the way to the lake one summer day in 2014. By the time he had finished hiking, he knew he would make a beer with peaches and sage, an herb he sees on trails all over Colorado. He cultured yeast from the skin of the peaches, and after the beer fermented, he aged it on Palisade peaches and sage.
Coleman’s connection to the beer was obvious when he told the story in October 2014 during a Beers Made by Walking Festival in Denver. It’s a good story, and it means still more to somebody who has hiked up to Hanging Lake or eaten a Palisade peach in Palisade. It also connected the listeners to the beer in a way that is not particularly easy to measure, but that is real.
Eric Steen organized the first Beers Made by Walking events in 2011 in conjunction with the Galleries of Contemporary Arts at Colorado Springs. He scheduled seven hikes during the summer, in which public groups that included homebrewers went on hikes and identified edible and medicinal plants. The homebrewers created recipes based on what they saw on a particular trail. Those were brewed commercially at a local brewery and served in a festival-like setting. The following year the program expanded to include 16 breweries, 10 homebrewers, and four events in three states—Colorado, Oregon, and Washington.
Steen trained as an artist, but turned toward organizing events when he was in graduate school at Portland State University, studying art and social practice. He moved to Colorado in 2011 to teach at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. He views the events as a logical extension of being a social artist and creates them to challenge people to see the world through a new set of lenses. “I think this is one function of art, but instead of doing this through the studio arts, I often use our own experiences in everyday life as my medium,” he said.
Steen went to work at Hopworks Urban Brewery in Portland, Oregon, in 2015 but continued to organize the walks in additional locations with the help of many volunteers. Naturalists and botanists usually guide the hikes, instructing brewers and hikers about the plants they see, including which might be tasty and which are deadly. Proceeds from festivals featuring beers inspired by the walks go to community organizations that sponsor the hikes. “They get a whole new group of people, younger, hipper, starting to volunteer for things like trail maintenance,” he said. “And the brewers get to get outside, learn about the landscape and native plants.”
A project in partnership with Portland’s Forest Park Conservancy in 2014 gained national attention, because it focused on the potential differences between yeast collected in an old-growth forest and in one that had been logged. In February, brewers from Thunder Island Brewing Co. set buckets of wort in different parts of the forest to collect wild yeast. One was set beside a decomposing log, another next to a snag full of holes where animals had made their homes, others near or under various trees. Another bucket was placed at a site nearby, adjoining a forest that was logged in the mid-1990s. They took the buckets back to the brewery, cultivated the yeast from each of them, and brewed with the yeast.
The results didn’t yield the quantifiable differences Steen and the other organizers would have liked. “We learned there was much microbial diversity from each site,” Steen said, but that the differences were so pronounced there was no way to make sense of them. The following May, hikers visited the sites where each yeast was collected and tasted the resulting beers. Although the project hadn’t resulted in something that could be quantified, Steen judged the project a success after he heard participants describe how the way they experience the forest had changed. “I like the idea of thinking of these beers as artwork—as drinkable sculptures or drinkable portraits,” he said. “It’s another way to interpret the landscape, another way to interpret the trail.”
Beers Made by Walking has introduced participants to the concept of place-based beer, which ties back to Steen’s other world, including place-based art. “It is interesting to take these concepts found in place-based art theory, and then not use them for the art world,” he said. He points to Harrell Fletcher, one of Steen’s instructors at Portland State, and similar artists for work that illustrates the way he thinks about place-based beer. Some of them create what is called land art, although British-born Hamish Fulton makes it clear his is not. “The physical involvement of walking creates receptiveness to the landscape. I walk on the land to be woven into nature,” he said (Tufnell 2007, 76).
“In this small field of art, the art is created for a specific site,” Steen said. “If it is removed it no longer is the same artwork because of the important connection to the site. The art object might still be around, but once it’s removed the artwork ceases to exist as the artist intended. The same thing may happen when you remove a beer from context. I don’t think beer is so site specific . . . but without understanding a place-based beer’s connection to a site it is difficult to fully appreciate.”
Again, his training as a social artist is apparent. “What I like about place-based art is it can address socio-political issues,” he said. Beer may not deal with such issues as easily, but “as consumers we are sold ideas. When beer is linked to place, landscape, communities, or local organizations it draws attention to socio-political matters in a different way.”
In his view, beer may not only function in the same way as art, it may be art. “I see (Beers Made by Walking) as art because people use their creativity to translate their experiences into new beers inspired by the landscape. I see it as some expanded form of landscape painting,” he said. And further, that “beer is like sculpture, or even more we could say it is some kind of social-sculpture. The idea of togetherness, relationships, and community seems to be part of the entire idea, production, and consumption of good beer.”
A conversation about beer as art, or brewer as artist, is one many brewers are not comfortable with and many consumers find pretentious. Caleb Levar, co-founder of Oakhold Farmhouse Brewery in Minnesota (see page 137), is a microbiologist by training. He and his partner, Levi Loesch, plan to make beers that taste of the Duluth, Minnesota, region where they are fermented spontaneously. Levar speaks with the conviction of a scientist—“It’s not what we can and cannot control. The challenge is the variables we don’t understand”—but acknowledges the art as well as the science of brewing.
“I have a very talented artist brother and we’ve talked about this a bit in the past, mostly in the context of ‘art versus science,’ although I believe that the very nature of that ‘versus’ is fundamentally flawed. So perhaps the more appropriate dichotomy is art and not-art,” he said. “First, I think it’s important to define what ‘art’ is, to me at least. In essence, I believe that ‘art’ can most broadly be defined as the application of one’s creativity in creation and discovery. So, with that said, I see some scientists as artists, and I see some brewers as artists. I think the key here, for me at least, is in the ‘creativity’ part of how I define ‘art.’
“Yes, there are scientists who do things by rote, and show little inspiration in the questions they ask and the experiments they do. The same can be said for some brewers, and I would go so far as to say some artists, as well, thinking here of the pen and paper and clay types. But all of these things, be it a brewhouse, a lab bench, or oils and canvas, can and do serve as the medium through which a person expresses his or her creativity.”
Marika Josephson approaches it, she says, as a “philosopher by disposition and training, and a beer maker by current profession.” She earned her PhD in philosophy from The New School in New York, but eventually decided a career in academia did not suit her and helped found Scratch Brewing outside the small town of Ava, Illinois. “Philosophers have always had to justify the value of their existence; I guess the same could be said for artist-craftsmen who use food as their palette,” she wrote for Mash Tun magazine. “How does food become art? When does craft become art?” (Josephson 2015, 146).
She wrote at the outset that the dishes at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant founded by René Redzepi, naturally seem like art to her. Redzepi puts ingredients “together in new ways to express something distinct about a place, to help us realize something new about our world.” In 2004 Redzepi and Claus Meyer signed a manifesto that established what became known as New Nordic Cuisine, which focuses on foraged plants and native fish and meats.
In 2012 Anders Kissmeyer, who was quickly joined by maltster Per Kølster and communications specialist Christian Anderson, laid the groundwork for New Nordic Beer. Their vision is “to create a novel category of beers that owe their distinct aroma, flavor, and taste to both novel ingredients as well as novel techniques applied in the production of the brewing ingredients, from the selection of cultivars, through breeding, growing, and processing of these to their final use in the brewing processes. The process towards the goal will take place in networks involving all links in the value chain through a journey that has no end.”
North American brewers know Kissmeyer well. A former brewmaster at Carlsberg, he often brews collaboratively with American brewers and is friends with many more. When Brooklyn Brewery opened the New Carnegie Brewery in Stockholm in partnership with Carlsberg, Brooklyn brewmaster Garrett Oliver invited Kissmeyer to speak at a symposium for Swedish brewers. Kissmeyer made it clear he considers New Nordic to be about more than ingredients.
“Terroir is what we are made of, and it is in our souls. Our souls are what guide us, and we will be in harmony with our souls if we express our terroir,” he said. “Expressing our soul and terroir gives us greater satisfaction as brewers—and greater satisfaction creates more excellence, innovation, and beauty.”
On a practical level the “New Nordic Beer Mafia” proposed establishing a database of plants, fruits, herbs, berries, and other ingredients that contribute to beer flavor. It would include food safety considerations, where the plants grow, when they should be gathered, how they would be used (whole, only parts, fresh, dried, extracting the active substances, etc.), and how and when they should be incorporated in the brewing process. For instance, a brewer might use the database to learn how much yarrow, sea buckthorn, heather, or wormwood would be appropriate in a particular beer.
In her essay, Josephson calls on the philosophy of both Plato and Gustav Stickley, the furniture maker who founded The Craftsman magazine in 1901. She wrote there are “certain painters who create something that communicates an essential truth about the world. I call this art, in contrast to Plato’s imitative kind—art as we know it today … helps us understand something profound about our existence.”
Stickley used The Craftsman to promote the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, which originated in England but found proponents in America. They favored simplicity in design and handmade products to which both producers and consumers would feel a connection. The philosophy was basically anti-industrial, and the movement’s influence waned as World War I began and Americans voted with their pocketbooks for cheaper, mass-produced items. Stickley wrote, “Art will be regarded not as something apart from common and everyday existence, but rather as the very means of realizing life.”
Scratch Brewing is located on the edge of 80 acres and almost every beer Josephson and Aaron Kleidon brew is made with ingredients grown nearby, many of them gathered in the woods. The beers are the antithesis of whatever anybody might define as industrial beer. Almost all the beer is sold to those who visit the brewery in the woods, much of it to people who live nearby. “I would guess that the real art in Redzepi’s craft is in part that it has a Proustian effect, and this may, in fact, be the peculiar power of food as an art,” Josephson wrote. “I watch in fascination as people—especially locals—drink beer we make. . . . Some say they remember something their grandmother used to make, or something they haven’t had in 50 years. Others say they remember a walk in the woods—woods from which we gathered the ingredients to make a particular beer.”
Part of the power of place resides with being familiar. Not every beer that results needs be called art, but Josephson believes some may. “If we’ve captured the essence of the forest or the essence of a plant—something about the comfort it provides, or the profound connection we have with it in nature—I would say that we, too, lowly beer makers, are more than mere craftsmen,” she wrote. “This is a peculiar art, and a rare one at that; an art that we might say was discovered by Stickley and one embodied only by craftsmen who transcend their craft. It is an art capable of communicating truths through the very means by which we realize life,” (Josephson, 154).
At Scratch, the art begins with collecting the ingredients. “The idea that we can just pick up the phone and order malt from anywhere, any yeast—it’s too easy,” said Mark Jilg, who named his brewery in Pasadena, California, Craftsman Brewing Company in 1995. “Great works of art come from struggle. Not just the work, but the time spent questioning.”
It seems Jilg is always asking the questions others do not. When he shows up at a pub to lead a tasting of his beer, participants are likely to hear about something beyond the history of his brewery or what is in a particular recipe. “Can you taste the intent of the brewer?” he asked drinkers during an event at Tiger! Tiger! in San Diego.
Intent is about as easy to measure as place in beer, but it matters when it matters. Consumers engage with beer at different levels, much as at a Beers Made by Walking event, where attendees signal they are predisposed to pay attention when they pay for admission. “Some consumers want a shared experience with the brewers,” Jilg said. “(They) should say, ‘It is my responsibility to figure out the brewer’s intent.’ If you can taste what the brewer is doing, then it is something special.”
Jilg described what he calls the American Reinheitsgebot—beer made with the same four ingredients the Germans specify (malt, hops, water, and yeast) and a fifth, marketing. “This issue of intent, I get frustrated. If you are focused on intent, being sincere, it is hard to embrace the fifth ingredient. Marketing has been about deceiving people. I get totally wound up about this. Beer should speak for itself.
“I’m comfortable with the thought that this beer is a straw man for me,” he said, nodding toward his glass. “Don’t pay attention to me. Pay attention to the beer.”
One of the few decorations at Craftsman Brewing Company is a banner with a label for Orange Grove Ale, made with Valencia oranges from trees that grow in his backyard. He makes other beers with local ingredients, including sage foraged from the nearby foothills. He began brewing these before local became a marketing tool.
“It is getting co-opted. Sometimes it has nothing to do with place,” he said. “They have learned how to place-wash and say it is local.”
High on the back wall of the brewery there’s a faded, tattered American flag. It was Jilg’s grandfather’s. “He grew up in St. Louis. His father died when he was six years old. Very do-it-yourself kind of guy,” Jilg said. “Like any flag it is a symbol; a placeholder for values, memories, ideals.”
Conversation about authenticity, as elusive as it might be, comes easily when looking up at the flag. “It’s all about being genuine, tied to a place. It can be inspired by the place you live, by the people around here. It can be conceptually about place, not physically about place,” he said. He talked about the symbiotic relationship that develops when beer is consumed locally. The brewers care about what their friends will be drinking, and consumers take pride in consuming beer made by people they know. “Once you have that genuineness, it fends off the evils of the twentieth century,” Jilg said.
Mark Jilg’s grandfather’s flag hangs at Craftsman Brewing Company in California, a reminder of the importance of “values, memories, ideals.”
In the twenty-first century relatively few beers will taste of the place where they are brewed. Some are meant to be an experience themselves; others need not be. That’s the nature of consumer goods. Of course, it is more complicated. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale may taste of Chico, California, to a lifelong resident, and simply good to a beer drinker in New Orleans who has never left Louisiana. Sierra Nevada produces beer on a rather large scale, and that doesn’t make it less genuine. “Being scalable is about being able to pay attention to all the details,” Jilg said. “Sierra Nevada has internalized the ability to pay attention.”
But scale is another signal. When Aaron Kleidon collected sap from a stand of birch trees near Scratch Brewing, he knew that “Single Tree: Birch” would be a small batch. “That’s a genuine constraint,” Jilg said. “We are going to do what is in that birch.”
Alaskan Brewing’s Winter Ale illustrates the constraint at another level. Geoff Larson provided details at the brewery website:
“To make beer in the volumes we need—that’s a lot of tips. Marcy hit on the idea of using Pep’s Packing out in Gustavus, because they do food packing and processing out there and can handle that end of it, and they end up getting essentially the whole town of Gustavus out picking spruce tips right when they first bud out in early spring—which, here in Alaska, is beginning of June. Pep’s perfected the packing. There are a number of steps including a process of aerating the tips once they’re packed—we found out that freezing and vacuum packing needs to be done in the right order or the tips can spoil.”
There’s more to place, more to local, than the ingredients, but there are times when the connection is particularly easy to make. “This is the mirror,” Jilg said. “When you go out and forage, you see the world differently. The mirror is when the consumer drinks the beer and thinks, This came from the world that is mine.”