So the great thing about Texas[1] is that winter ends quickly. The bad thing about Texas is that summer starts sometime in March.[2]
That means it’s paramount to discuss that one, all important issue: beer. There’s nothing better on a hot summer day than a cold beer.[3] Last year I drank a lot of Shiner Bock.[4] This year, though, I’m putting some thought in to the whole thing. And I’m going to share those thoughts with you.[6]
The thing about summer beers is that you have to go light. So, basically, a nice lager or a hefeweizen. Nothing too spicy, either. That’s more of a spring thing.[8] Also, it’s a good time for fruit beers.[9]
So, without further ado, my top five beers of summer, 2011 edition:
5. Sam Adams Coastal Wheat
4. Abita Amber. Abita is a Louisiana brewery. They make some crazy-ass shit, but I think their straight Amber is my favorite by far. Here’s a glass that I enjoyed with seafood gumbo at The Gumbo Shop in the French Quarter:[10]
3. Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat[11]
2. Shiner Ruby Redbird. Grapefruit in beer = amazing. Seriously. This is the only Shiner I’ve genuinely gotten excited about.
1. Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy. Hefeweizen + lemonade. It’s a dangerous combination.[14]
The fascinating thing about the top three summer beers, though, is that they’re only good when ice cold and it’s above 80 degrees. So I think it’s odd that a Wisconsin brewery managed to make that happen, since it’s so rarely that hot up there. Still, they’re perfect for Texas summer.
Also, for the record, the top five beers I’d love to be drinking/haven’t tried yet:
5. Metropolitan Dynamo
4. Founders Cherry Wheat. It’s like soda. Friggin’ delicious.
3. Two Brothers Prairie Path Golden Ale. Man, I miss Two Brothers…
2. Mustang Washita Wheat. They’re Oklahoma City based and only opened in the last year or two. I drink/pick up Mustang every time I pass through Oklahoma. So far they’ve only expanded in to Kansas. Sadface.
1. Rahr & Sons Summertime Wheat. I, um, I need to get over to Fort Worth and try some. I’m thinking of heading over to Fort Worth on Saturday for a brewery tour.
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[1]Holy fuck. I just wrote a sentence that started with the words “So the great thing about Texas...” For the record, there are only about five ways I can end that sentence. Two others involve beer, and the fourth is Fuzzy’s Taco Shop. Since one of those beers is Rahr & Sons, that pretty much means that I love Fort Worth, Texas. Nearly as much as I love Austin.
[2]The official onset of summer starts with what I call “The Butters Test.” Butters is my sister and bro-in-law’s schnauzer. He’s a walker, that Butters. But when it starts getting hot out all he wants to do is lie down in the shade of a nice tree and not move. Daisy hit the Butters Test marker on April 1st.
[3]Except ice cream. Ice cream is awesome. Especially in the form of Skinny Cow Mint Ice Cream Sandwiches. Holy shit, those things are like crack.
Also, Fuzzy’s shrimp tacos are pretty goddamn sweet on a hot summer day.
[4]Shiner Bock fulfills one of my most important life rules: drink local. It also fulfills my most important beer snob rule: always have a list of acceptable beers that are widely available. Most places don’t have a wide beer selection, so it’s a good idea to be able to look at a menu and quickly know that most of the selections are crap, so you can safely pick one or two and you’ll be fine. In Texas the solution is the words, “I’ll take a Shiner,” about 90% of the time. Otherwise, my default beers are Harp, Bass, Sam Adams, Sam Adams Seasonal, Smithwick’s, and Stella Artois if I’m desperate. In Chicago there’s the addition of Goose Island 312[5] and Honker’s Ale. In Wisconsin there’s New Glarus Spotted Cow. In Michigan it’s usually pretty easy to get something in a Bell’s.
These are important things to know.
[5]I’ve always thought of that as “three-twelve” and thought it was a really weird name for a beer. About a month ago I realized, “Oh, three-one-two is the Chicago area code. Right.” Apparently I’m a dumbass.
[6]Also, I want to write a post that’s mostly footnote because the idea amuses me.[7]
[7]If I ever write my memoirs the name will be Lost in Footnotes*
*The Geds Story
[8]I like a good white ale, but there’s a reason those tend to be spring seasonals. Weirdly, the other common spring seasonal is a bock and I just plain do not like bocks 75% or more of the time. Shiner Bock is the only one I consistently enjoy and I know there’s another one out there that I like, but I can’t place it at the moment. Otherwise, nope. I can think, for instance, of Rahr & Sons Bucking Bock and Leinenkugel’s 1888 Bock that I just don’t like even though I’m a fan of both breweries and the Rahr & Sons apparently did well in the 2010 US Open Beer Championships. Also, I’ve come to the conclusion that there does not exist in this world a Pale Ale that I actually enjoy. But that’s neither here nor there.
[9]Much ado is made about keeping beers simple and brewing only using water, barley, hops, and yeast. The first three are based on the Reinheitsgebot, the celebrated German beer purity laws. The fourth wasn’t known as a beer making ingredient at the time the laws were passed. There’s some idea that beer must follow those laws, but they weren’t passed with an idea of a purity of beer in mind. They were actually passed to keep the price of other foodstuffs that were being brewed in to beers down.
That’s it.
Beer has been brewed pretty much since the start of civilization. It’s actually possible to argue that civilization exists because of beer. Most of the oldest beer recipes include grapes, as the grape was known as a fermenting agent long before much of anything else was. Hence, y’know, wine.
People have short memories, though. So we don’t really think of beer as being this super-important, older than dirt sort of thing. I think that, in America, at least, we owe a lot of the re-awakening of the idea of beer as a thing that can be brewed with anything and as a fascinating historical artifact to the good folks at Dogfish Head. They are one of my absolute favorite breweries specifically because Sam Calagione, the founder, hasn’t yet met an ingredient he won’t try to turn in to beer and hasn’t run in to a possible ancient beer recipe that he won’t try. For the record, Dogfish Head Midas Touch, based on a 3000 year-old recipe from Turkey, is amazing. And I’ve had Chateau Jiahu, based on a 9000 year-old recipe from China. I enjoyed that, too.
[10]Also, The Gumbo Shop. Man. A. Live.
[11]Leinie’s is the only Midwestern beer that is readily available in Texas. In fact, other than randomly ending up in a bar in Mobile, AL that served Bell’s, it’s the only Midwestern beer I’ve seen outside of the Midwest. The reason for this is simple: Leinie’s is actually owned by Miller.
This is potentially scandalous. A couple months ago news broke that Anheuser-Busch had bought out Goose Island, Chicago’s best-known microbrewery.[12] This was instantly assumed to be a bad thing. I thought of it as a bad thing. But that’s before I realized that Miller owns Leinie’s.
Beer production is a problematic thing for one simple reason: it’s not possible to scale up without massive capital expenditure. The reason for this is equally simple: you can’t hurry beer making. It’s simply not possible to add an extra shift of workers or speed up the production line. If it takes three weeks for a beer to ferment, it takes three weeks. So if you want to double production you have to buy more equipment, period. That shit is expensive.
Further, it’s kind of a make-or-break proposition. If something gets screwed up in the beer making process, which isn’t exactly an unlikely scenario, you’ve just lost an entire batch and all the money from that batch. That, in turn, means that if you just bought a bunch of equipment to expand…well, you get my drift.
Microbrewing is extremely popular in the United States right now. We can thank The Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams) for that, as they pretty much single-handedly broke the Miller/Bud/Coors stranglehold on the American market and made it possible for people to ask for beers that weren’t the color, consistency, and flavor of urine.
But there’s a vast difference between demand and capacity, and that’s what kills a lot of smaller companies, especially since there’s plenty of competition. So there are a lot of local favorites,[13] some of which become regional favorites. A very small number of those then hit the big time. In America the big ones that are still independent and not the Boston Beer Company are New Belgium, Lagunitas, Sierra Nevada, Big Sky, and Dogfish Head (which has a much bigger footprint than it should, specifically because of its quirky niche). There are a few others that I’m probably missing. Then there are a lot of beers that fit under the big, but not too big umbrella. Think Anchor, Full Sail, Widmer, Bell’s, Stone, Great Divide, etc. Basically, it seems as if there’s a magic threshold somewhere around 100,000-150,000 barrels/year. If a brewery can hit that they’ll probably be a regional powerhouse and have a chance at a national market. If they can get above that they’ll be playing with the big boys.
Dogfish Head had to pull out of four states and cancel international plans this year even though they’ve significantly expanded capacity, simply because they couldn’t keep up with increasing demand. This pissed people off. Seriously, I follow them on Facebook and I tend to read comments whenever they post things specifically to see how long it takes for someone to pop in and say, “You guys are assholes for pulling out of Indiana/Rhode Island,” or, “When are you going to start selling in Deer Fart, Saskatchewan?” It’s kinda funny. They risked people off for a reason: Dogfish Head wasn’t big enough and their goal is to make as many crazy beers as possible. They’re not trying to simply crank out enough 60 Minute IPA to meet demand.
For Goose Island, though, there’s a different story. They do have some really interesting beers in their Bourbon County series, but mostly they stick to 312, Honker’s Ale, and their seasonals. As such, if A-B doesn’t interfere with Goose Island’s brewing and simply invests enough to increase capacity, then I should be able to buy 312 in Texas one of these days just like I can get Leinenkugel’s at my local Kroger. And that’s a good thing for everyone involved. 95% of Leinenkugel’s is still produced in Chippewa Falls, WI. The other 5% comes out of the old Blatz Brewery in Milwaukee. And they’re still using the classic recipes.
Because the dirty secret is this: the megabreweries can’t compete on an even scale with the microbreweries and really shouldn’t try. Because when they do we end up with Blue Moon. So if the business model is, “Buy a small brewery, then invest money so they can do what they do best, just more of it,” that’s awesome.
That said, the master brewer at Goose Island no longer has a job because of the A-B buyout. That’s not a good sign.
[12]Goose Island is also my third-favorite Chicago microbrewery. I’ll take Metropolitan and Two Brothers over Goose Island any day of the week.
[13]When I was in Vicksburg last month I discovered the Lazy Magnolia brewery, based out of Kiln, MS. Specifically, I discovered Southern Pecan, a nut brown brewed with, you guessed it, pecans. Delicious. A couple days later I found myself wandering around the French Quarter with some Lazy Magnolia Jefferson Stout. That probably would have been far more enjoyable if I wasn't stuffed with seafood gumbo, jambalaya, crawfish etouffee, and bread pudding.
[14]Someone once asked me, for reasons I can’t remember or comprehend, if liking Summer Shandy was a hit against his manhood. Fuck no. Liking Summer Shandy is a sign that you know a damn good beer when you taste it.
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