The Yokohama Winter Beer Bash

After an uneventful train ride to Yokohama, we met up with Ian's friend Patrick, who had been living in Japan for ten years and is now happily married. Patrick lives and works as a wellness coach in Yokohama, in addition to several other business interests.

Patrick took us to lunch at a favored soba restaurant, where I had a delicious bowl of hot soba with slices of duck breast. We proceeded along the bay (which is great...a wide park between the city and the water running for maybe a mile) and then through the city to the beer fest, which was held at a pier in the industrial section of the waterfront.

The fest itself was far smaller than what I expected coming from the US, but made sense given the younger beer culture in Japan. Japanese craft beer seems to be 15-20 years behind the US. The beer list in restaurants is (literally) a choice between "draft beer" and "bottled beer" and (according to Patrick) there is no concept of beer beyond watery mass market Asahi/Kirin/Suntory for most people. There were maybe a dozen breweries at the festival, and probably half of them were started by American expats. I will have to list the beers I tried in a separate post, but the short story is that they were all new to me, which always makes me happy.

During the fest, I met a really nice Québécois, named Luc, who had brewed in Montreal for 10 years and was now going to start a brewery north of Tokyo...I will try to meet up with him at CBC this year in Washington, DC. The win for the day though, was meeting Scott Brimmer, who opened Brimmer Brewing just outside of Tokyo about a year ago. Scott brewed at Sierra Nevada for nine years before moving to Japan. We talked for a while and, unsolicited, he offered an invitation to visit his brewery, which I am doing today (Monday). Details to follow!

Observation: inside the cultural bubble that is Craft beer in Japan, the brewers and other drivers in the industry are rock stars, and I think they get a lot of people trying to ride their coattails, or get their attention. For example, Patrick had gotten me in touch with Bryan Baird, owner of Baird Brewing in Numazu, before arriving. We had a good conversation about beer in the US vs. Japan at the festival, but I got a very polite brush-off when asking about visiting their brewery (which is how I met Luc, fortunately). Likewise, I was introduced to and tried to speak with Ry, who publishes Craft Beer Japan, and got a very rude response, as in "I'm not even going to stop walking to tell you to buzz off." (In fairness, he was in the middle of running a beer fest, but come on.)

Finally, we wrapped up the day by walking back to the commercial district, very quickly visiting the Cup Noodles Museum, and having dinner at my favorite conveyor sushi restaurant in all of Yokohama. It was very helpful to have a near-native speaker with us to order all manner of delicious plates. Below: three cuts of tuna from "shitty" to divine o-toro. Of course, the worst cut was far superior to anything I could hope to get back home in Nashville, with apologies to Mr. Choo and Samurai Sushi.

Beer Review - Bullfrog Brewery, Williamsport, PA

Despite being severely delayed due to my laziness, I'm reporting today (October 14) on a visit to a Pennsylvania brewpub on August 20.

Williamsport

For work, back in August, I found myself in Williamsport, PA. For those of you not familiar with Williamsport, it is a) close to nowhere (about equidistant from Buffalo, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, see map below), b) the home of the Little League World Series (which, incidentally, started the day I was there), and c) has some tasty tasty beer.


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The Bullfrog Brewery

The brewery is actually a brewpub, and it is pretty sweet. The pub is right on the main street in downtown Williamsport, which is an authentic small town business district. When you walk in, the copper kettle and mash tun are right in your face, just in case you didn't get the whole beer thing from the sign outside. Turn left into the restaurant and there are about eight big fermenters behind the bar. Check it out at bullfrogbrewery.com

The Beer

I had a sampler, as you can see above. I tried Apricot Wheat, Edgar IPA, the stout, an Oktoberfest, and several others.  Overall, pretty good beer, but the IPA was exceptional, as was the stout.  Oktoberfest and the Wheat were eh, but that was OK, because they have great atmosphere.  It was also extra delicious since I got to emailing with Dru and Bair, and because silly David chose to drive to Baltimore instead of having a beer and flying out of ol' Williamsport-Lycoming Regional. 

The airport, incidentally, is itty-bitty.  It is the kind of place with one airline (US Air), having one ticket agent, who is also the gate agent, who is also the ramp agent.  Seriously, she printed my ticket, went out an unloaded/reloaded the baggage on the plane, drove it around to "baggage claim" and then came back in to scan everyone's ticket and load the plane.  And she did all this in about 20 minutes.  Too bad you don't see that kind of efficiency in Philladelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, or any of the other dumb hubs that I have to fly through.

The Brewery Post

So we have visited two breweries/brasseries/brouwerijen (depending on where you live) this week. First:

Brouwerij De Halve Maan

A quick history: The "Half Moon" is the only brewery remaining in the city of Brugge. There has been a brewery on the site (which is right in the middle of the city center) since the 16th century, and the building was bought around 1850 by the Maes family. The business was purchased and shut down "by a big brewery" in the '90s and reopened as De Halve Maan in 2005 by the same family. Today, they brew under the brand Bruges Zot.

We visited the brewery and pub on Thursday afternoon and took a tour. I was pleased with the presentation, because it focused very superficially on the actual brewing process (which I already know something about). Instead, we toured the building, going all the way up to the roof for a panoramic view of the city, and the discussion focused on the history of the company, the building, and the historical brewing process. The building is actually a series of buildings, which continuously expanded as the business grew through the 1900s, and they are full of turn of the century brewing equipment...open air fermenters, a copper cooling pan, and a really interesting copper heat exchanger.

Here is a picture of the heat exchanger. It is constructed of a LOT of copper pipes, about 2 inches in diameter, stacked together. This is really just for exposed surface area...these are really "half moon" pipes. That's also why the whole thing is wavy...more surface area in the same height. The hot beer is (literally) poured in the top, which is open, and it then dribbles down and out a pipe, into a pan at the bottom. All that copper surface area radiates heat like mad.

Additionally, there are fittings on the side for water pipe (one is at the very bottom of the picture). There are additional sealed pipes inside that cold water flows through, picking up even more heat off the beer. This is a really neat piece of old technology, even though it must have cost a fortune to build, because it is exactly the same principle used in every brewery today from my back porch up to the big boys.

About the beer...

The beer was fantastic! They make three varieties here: Bruges Zot Blonde, Bruges Zot Brown (a dubbel), and a dark trippel called Straffe Hendrik. The blonde was light bodied, creamy, a touch hoppy, and had very faint aromas of orange and cardamom. (I'm cheating a little in naming that...they told us in the tour that orange peel and cardamom are in the recipe, but you can still taste it.)

The brown however, wow. It was my favorite beer of the trip until the next day in Ghent, when I had a beer made in that city. The brown is slightly higher alcohol, at 7.5%. (Note that I haven't seen a beer here under about 5.5%. The Belgians aren't scared to kick their beer up a notch.) It is much more complex, without some of the sweetness associated with the blonde. That is pretty remarkable...it is difficult to make a strong beer dry, simply because you are starting with and expect to end with more sugar.

Brewery Cantillon

The day before our visit to Brugge, we went to visit Brewery Cantillon, which is the last brewery remaining in the city of Brussels. Cantillon is also a family business, run by the sixth generation of the same family. They brew a much more traditional beer, but one which very few people outside of Belgium have probably ever had, and which is unfortunately dying off.

Cantillon brews lambic (lam-bik), gueze (gooz), kriek (creek), framboise (fram-bwoz) and a number of variations of those biers (beers). All of these are actually based on lambic, by blending and adding other ingredients. Lambic is a sour, flat beer, based on the way it is produced. I know that doesn't sound too appetizing, but it is quite good.

Lambic is produced by using wild yeast and bacteria in the air, rather than inoculating with a single known strain like modern brewers. After the boil, the beer is poured into an enormous copper pan in the attic of the building, which is exposed to open air. The pan is about 20 feet on a side, and about 8 or 12 inches deep. Leaving the proto-beer there overnight allows it to cool, as well as collect yeast from the air. After several hours like this, the beer is put into oak casks for up to 3 years to ferment. The beer is flat because these casks are not completely sealed...carbon dioxide slowly leaks out through the wood.

At Cantillon, we took a tour of the old building before sampling the wares. This was a really cool way of touring, because they just gave us a booklet explaining the process and set us loose. Really. They sent us down the hall and we got to poke around where ever we wanted. Here is a picture of Dru, hanging out with one of their two big copper brew kettles. From here we checked out their grain storage, old equipment, and wandered around the cellar (see the picture of me, above, with barrels of lambic).

After the tour, we sampled the gueze and the kriek. Gueze is a blend of 1, 2, and 3 year old lambic. Because it has the young beer, there is sugar going into the bottle, which is fermented, which carbonates the beer as it ages in the cellar. It was incredible...it tasted like a dry, sour white wine. The sourness is a bit of a kick when you first taste the beer, but it really grows on you.

Kriek is lambic which has sat on macerated cherries for several months before bottling. There are many other variations, using other fruit like grapes or strawberries, all of which have their own names. The kriek was not sweet like you would expect, because the sugar from the fruit was fermented as well. It was still a sour drink, but the essence of the cheries was quite prominent. Not my particular cup of tea, but Dru was a big fan.

A dying breed

These beers are dying off due to commercial imitators. As brewing technology advanced and the process became more commercialized, people looked for ways to produce more beer faster. However, Belgium does not protect the formula or production method of lambic beers, like you would for a certain variety of wine, cheese, or meat.

A lot of brewers today who produce these beers will simply add sugar and cherry flavor to a modern non-sour beer, rather than taking the risks of wild yeast inoculation and waiting for years before bottling. This means that most people know kriek as a very sweet, sugary, fruity drink, rather than a dry, sour one. I would encourage anyone to seek out and try a gueze or kriek, but you should make sure that it is a sour, traditionally produced lambic beer. While there are a few others out there, I cannot name another brewer besides Cantillon. The good news though, is that they are distributed across the United States, so it should be possible to find it.

That is all I have for now on beer and brewers...was it enough? I will leave you with a picture of Happy-Ben in the courtyard at De Halve Maan, drinking Bruges Zot brown.

Beer and Shellfish

Well, I'm using the term "shellfish" very loosely here, because I'm talking about escargot...snails for the non-gastronomically inclined.

As we were walking around Brussels on our first afternoon here, we ran across this little gem:


That's right...snails from a truck. Well, Dru thinks that tacos from the taco truck near our house is sketchy, so snails from this run down little trailer sounds like a "no-can-do, monsieur." However, in retrospect (and since I had some snails at lunch today), I'm thinking that I will try out the escargots if we see another street vendor like this.

I'm a little curious how it is served...covered in sugar a la gaufre (Belgian waffles from a truck)? Probably not. In a paper cone with mayonnaise, like frittes (French--or rather Belgian--fries)? I guess I will just have to get some and report back.

Dru says: You are just asking for a case of salmonella if you do that.

And the beer


I promised to dedicate a post to liquid bread a few days ago, and here it is. Thesis: Belgium knows what it is doing when it comes to beer. Evidence: There are hundreds of breweries in the country (I've seen numbers between 100 and 300), for a population of about 10 million people. By comparison, the US has about the same number of breweries (excluding brewpubs and restaurants), for a population approaching 300 million. Further, in the US, about 5 of those breweries are extreme outliers from the pack, in terms of production and sales. While there are leading brands here, a much wider variety is available anywhere you go.

Over the last few days, I've made an effort to not drink the same beer twice. Here is a quick list of beers that we have had:

• Grimbergen
• Chimay Blue
• Rochefort
• Cantillion Labic
• Cantillion Gueze
• Morte Subite Framboise
• Morte Subite Kriek
• Westmalle Dubel
• Duvel
• Ramee
• Serafin Celtic Angel
• Kwak
• Belgoo Luppo
• V Cense
• Hofbrouwerijke Hofblues

...and there are probably others that I haven't written down. I list this not as proof of addiction, but rather as evidence of the extreme variety available. We will talk about the Beer Circus in another post, but besides that one meal, we haven't gone to any "beer specialty" places. Rather, every bar, restaurant, and brasserie is a beer specialist.

Another interesting point about advertising and consumption here: each bar has a "house" beer, with a sign out on the street. This is analogous to a bar serving primarily Bud or Miller products in the US, except that there are probably a dozen "inexpensive" brands that have bought house status: Maes, Palm, Stella Artois, etc. (Yes, I just did that...Stella is piss. And I apologize to all of you back home who have succumbed to a good advertising campaign, but honestly--try a real beer.)

Now the one drawback. I hate to criticize beer culture here, but the one thing that I have found is that variety of styles is lacking. Every single brewery offers a Belgian Ale, with a few others brewing lambic, gueze, kriek, and variations. I think there is a slight movement to "hop up" the beer, like American brewers have done since the early '90s, but it is not widespread. Having said that, all of the beers are distinct from each other.

We are also going to write about our visit to the Cantillion brewery, but good day to you, for now.