Ted Rice, at the time a pub brewer at Blue Corn Café & Brewery in Albuquerque, had never tasted a German-made kölsch before he brewed one in 2003 that won gold at the Great American Beer Festival. A few years later, after he had visited Köln, he shook his head when I asked him to compare their beer with the one he’d made himself. “I can see some similarities,” he said, smiling broadly.
Drinking kölsch in Köln or helles in the south of Germany put those traditional beers in perspective. “You see how delicate and refined they are. What happens when a number of breweries around a town or region all focus on one style is they elevate it,” Rice told me. “Even a simple . . . ,” he paused to consider his choice of words, “everyday beer gets better.”
In these pages, Jeff Alworth explains how these styles are a result of regional and national ways of thinking about beer. His premise is basic: “To really understand the beers brewed in other countries, you have to put yourself in the mind of those brewers, to see how they came to their own basic assumptions and how they shape their beer.” He also provides a definition of national tradition, writing, “It is a cultural institution, invisible, yet strangely powerful. Like other cultural institutions, it is created and perpetuated by interaction and familiarity.”
When Jeff shares the secrets he’s learned, he is not referring only to a list of ingredients or even brewing instructions. Brewers have learned directly from each other for millennia. “That’s still the way people learn to brew craft beer,” according to John Isenhour, a former pub brewer himself and now an instructor at Kennesaw State University whose classes focus on both the scientific and cultural aspects of brewing. His doctoral thesis dealt with the social history of brewing. Before the Industrial Revolution and widespread use of scientific tools such as the thermometer, some knowledge could only be passed directly from brewer to brewer. “You had to experience it with him,” Isenhour said. “He’d say you do this when a mash bites smartly on your finger. You had to be there the first time to know what that meant.”
Today, head brewer Jason Thompson can start the first brew of the day at Urban Chestnut Brewing Company in St. Louis from a tablet at home. The sparkling stainless steel 60-barrel brewhouse looms behind a 75-foot-long bar in the brewery’s massive beer hall, with all its automation on display. Standing on the brew deck as a batch nears completion in one kettle while another starts to his left, he says, “We’ve got some action now. This is when it starts to get fun.” He doesn’t really need to be monitoring the system; he’s programmed what ingredients will be added and when, and tweaked the process based on the raw materials.
Those are the essentials Thompson learned during more than a dozen years of brewer-to-brewer education. He began brewing in the Gordon Biersch Restaurant and Brewery chain in 2004. Cofounder Dan Gordon was the first American in more than 40 years to graduate from the five-year brewing program at the Technical University of Munich in Weihenstephan, Germany. “There was never a decision [to focus on German-inspired beers],” Thompson says. “I was going to brew beer and I was hired by a lager brewery.”
He went to work for German-born and -trained Florian Kuplent (see profile) not long after Urban Chestnut opened in 2011. “It’s hard to put into words,” Thompson says, describing what he has learned from Kuplent. “I think we put a lot of emphasis on sourcing good ingredients. Florian comes from a place, our beer here comes from a place, where ingredients are important.”
It’s easy to visualize the invisible hand Jeff writes about when Thompson talks about adjusting the process to accommodate the raw materials. “We can do that because their understanding of what the beer should be is so sound,” says Kurt Driesner, Urban Chestnut’s quality assurance manager.
Ted Rice’s 2003 medal illustrates that good ingredients and brewing practices can produce awards, but, as he discovered, the beer itself may not represent the place it comes from. Rice later helped found Marble Brewery, which in 2014 won Small Brewery of the Year at the GABF. Many of his beers have captured medals, including Marble Pilsner, the Kellerbier gold medalist at WBC in 2014 and bronze medalist in 2016. All the other Kellerbier winners were from European breweries.
“Are we trying to make a German pilsner?” Rice asks. “No. We are making an American beer. I never want to make a knockoff.” And he comes back to the everyday beers he discovered in Germany. “We [American brewers] try to make a broad range for everybody. That’s what we excel at. The things we make every day we do better,” he says.
To that end, Jeff Alworth offers us a book full of out-of-the-ordinary everyday beers. Beers that brewers make every day, day after day. Beers that consumers drink every day, day after day.
Pick a style, any style, and begin learning from the best in the business.
— Stan Hieronymus
Author of Brewing Local: American-Grown Beer and others