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About Vernonia's voice. (Vernonia, OR) 2007-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 10, 2010)
in other words Another Round: More Words of Wisdom About Beer By Scott Laird We brewers don’t make beer, we just get all the ingredients together and the beer makes itself. -Fritz Maytag, President Anchor Brewing Reunion ‘10--A Beer for Hope From Bison Brewing--Bison Brewing has returned for a fourth year as a brewing partner in a limited release of Reunion ‘10, a Belgian-style Scotch Ale that benefits myeloma and bone cancer research. Brewed in honor of their friend and original business partner, Virginia MacLean who lost her battle with multiple myeloma in 2007, Pete Slosberg of Pete’s Brewing and Alan Shapiro of Bison, along with Brewers at Terrapin Beer Company have developed an ale this year that is dark amber in color, with complex malt flavors, spicy with hints of clove and cinnamon and a refreshing full flavored finish. A good beer for a good cause, it’s available in 22 ounce bottles. My Buddy Brady--Part II Last month in this column (July 13, volume 4, issue 13) we introduced you to our friend Brady Romtvedt, a Brewer at the McMenamins Cornelius House Roadhouse, who happens to lives in Vernonia. Brady is a very good brewer who offers an interesting perspective on what it’s like to brew beer, and drink it- -and get paid for it! The following is the rest of our interview with Brady the Brewer. Vernonia’s Voice: So you’re getting to brew a lot of different beers. Do you have any favorites that are more fun to brew? Brady: Sometimes when I brew Ruby Ale, that’s the one I’m looking forward to, because it uses less grains than most-- it’s the easiest beer to brew. Every grain that I grind in dry, I have to scoop out with a bucket wet. So sometimes I look forward to brewing these lower alcohol, simpler beers. On the other hand, brewing a beer like an IPA, this is something where I’m really reaching into my stores of grain for just the right dashes of this or that to get the right color, get the body right where I want it and then I get to hop that. When you throw the hops in the kettle, it makes the whole brewery and the gardens outside smell wonderful. I love doing an IPA where I’m doing four different hops additions and getting over a pound of hops per keg. So it’s wonderfully fun to brew and then it’s heinously hard to clean up after. So it’s always a trade-off. Since I tend to look at things positively, I have something to look forward to every day-- either a very interesting beer to brew or an easy and relaxing beer to brew. VV: Lagers are something new that Oregon Microbrews are starting to try. Have you tried brewing a Lager? Brady: Yeah, I have. I think that Lagers are wonderful beers. And when the world thinks of beer, they probably think of a Lager. Here in America, almost all Lagers are mass-produced and use adjuncts like corn and rice that tend to take away from the full-flavored way they would have tasted a hundred years ago. Microbreweries are fairly new to producing their own Lagers-- Ales were always the alternative to the boringness of Lagers. But Lagers are not actually boring at all when they are done with full- quality ingredients and done well. And doing that well is a challenge. It’s given me a new respect for macrobreweries and people who have been doing Lagers for a long time. When you have something that doesn’t have a lot of hops or dark grains to give it flavor, then it’s about having a very clean brew all the way through, nothing is going to hide any flavor in that. Fermentation is really the art of brewing a good Lager. For me and us at McMenamins, that’s a new challenge. We’ve had Lagers on tap continuously for over a year. We just got a chance to brew a Lager for the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Goonies movie that was filmed in Astoria-- We sent ten kegs of “Chunks Ten Pin Lager” over to the coast and it was very well received. We are becoming more proficient in the art of brewing a good Lager. VV: Anything you haven’t brewed yet that you are thinking about trying? Something we can be looking forward to? Brady: My goal as a brewer would be to be able to brew a tasty, drinkable ale made without hops. If you look back on the history of brewing, hops were either not available or one of many things that brewers used to bitter the beer, because beer needs to be bitter or it’s going to taste too sugary sweet. So people have used different herbs and spices to bitter their beer over the years. But when hops came into prominence, all that other knowledge was kind of lost. There used to be something called Gruit Ale and Gruit was a proprietary mixture of herbs controlled by the church-- it was their way of taxing alcohol. I would really like to be able to brew a Gruit Ale. But it’s one of those things that I’m trying to find time and more space at a very homebrew-sized batch level to work out that recipe, because it would be very easy to make twelve kegs of undrinkable beer by going out on a branch like that. Brewing has such a rich and varied history and for so long in America we had a monoculture of mass produced Lagers with adjuncts. And now, with the rise of microbrews, we have a full selection of ales and other wonderful beers but we’re still only beginning to tap historically what’s been done with beer. VV: Anything else you want to say about brewing that we haven’t talked about yet? Brady: The one thing I see as an important movement in brewing that hasn’t quite happened yet is a trend towards localism. We’ve seen it somewhat here in Oregon where there tends to be a brewery close by as opposed to not. Craft beer in America-- and you’ll have to check my statistics-- only accounts for about ten percent of the total beer market. So most people are still drinking beer that was brewed hundreds of miles from their home in a factory and transported by semi truck. Beer is mostly water and the environmental cost to move it around is one of the bigger costs of making beer. So you have all these small towns and the people aren’t into the whole microbrew thing because they are not into anything new or something coming from the Portland area. But I also see those same people preferring to spent time locally, get their goods locally when they can, and yet they are drinking Bud Lite or Coors or Pabst on tap. We have the beer culture and resources in Oregon to serve communities locally and what I would like to be a part of is a movement for small brewers to serve local communities by offering them beer at a price that people are are willing to pay and edge out some of those others, especially now that Bud, Miller and Coors are all majority-owned by foreign countries. I think there is definitely a sentiment of localism that we could tap into and we could serve our local communities with things like beer just like we do with produce, berries and farm fresh eggs-- I’d like beer to take a similar turn. july13 2010 13 is one of the best ways to just have a good conversation. And I take it that means a pint or a few?! The person who comes to mind first is Walt Whitman. He was a guy who, from the way his contemporaries described him, was extremely unique, dynamic and you would never really meet another guy like him. William James described him as a “once born soul.” He was someone who very much made his own way in life. His writing is very much inspiring to me and inspired the tradition of American philosophy and I think there would not be a boring moment having a beer with that guy. I’d like to have a beer with Paul Simon. Growing up, I only had my parents’ music collection to listen to for a long time and Paul Simon’s Graceland CD was then, and continues to be a favorite now. I think the guy was musically brilliant and I really appreciate what he’s done on the cultural level to bring more world flavor to American music. In the lyrics to one of his songs he says “...we talked about the good old days, and we drank ourselves some beers,” with beers plural-- and I’ve always liked that description with beers as plural, even though it doesn’t need to be. That just put the icing on the cake. So Paul Simon would be another guy I’d like to have a pint with. And third, I’d like to have a pint VV: Last question-- if you with a friend I just met, Bob Paleck. could sit down and have pint with He’s a guy that in the brief dinner we had any three people, living or dead, who together, we got to talk about Hinduism would they be and why? and geothermal energy. He’s a guy I’d Brady: That’s a great question, like to talk more with. And that one because having a pint with someone might actually be doable!
