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[iski]

ate one morning, Calagione and I drove to Philadelphia to see an archeological chemist he knows named Patrick McGovern. Calagione looked washed out and a little crotchety—a rare thing—after one too many glasses of grappa the night before. When I mentioned Oliver’s misgivings to him, he smirked, as if hearing them for the hundredth time. “Garrett and I are good friends, but we definitely disagree on this,” he said. “It’s a purist versus populist position. If all of our palates are subjective, who am I and who is Garrett to decide whether there’s too much hops in a beer, or whether you should be putting lemongrass or rampe leaves in it? As long as it finds an audience, it’s valid.”

Extreme beer is a return to normality, too, Calagione believes. It’s just the normality of a thousand years ago, or several thousand, rather than a hundred. If the Reinheitsgebot is still the touchstone for most American brewers, Calagione’s is a bronze bowl from King Midas’ tomb.

The historical Midas was a Phrygian ruler in what is now central Turkey. When he or one of his close relatives was buried, around 730 B.C., the tomb was filled with more than a hundred and fifty drinking vessels—parting toasts to the dead king. By the time they were excavated, in 1957, the liquid inside them had evaporated. But Patrick McGovern, forty years later, was able to analyze some residue from a bowl and identify its chemical content. By matching the compounds to those found in the foods and spices of ancient Turkey, McGovern gradually pieced together the liquid’s main ingredients: honey, barley, and grapes, and a yellow substance that was probably saffron. It was a beer, but like none we’ve ever tasted.

[iski]

“Beer is a much older concept than the Reinheitsgebot,” McGovern told us later, at the University of Pennsylvania. He was sitting at a chipped metal desk in his basement office at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, surrounded by sagging bookshelves and dusty lab equipment: a furnace, a microscale, a spectrometer, a liquid chromatograph. Here and there, chunks of pottery and other artifacts were wrapped in plastic or aluminum foil and stuffed in file drawers or ratty cardboard cases. “You’re taking nine thousand years of brewing history and just looking at the last five hundred years of it,” he said.

McGovern is a wizardly figure with a long white beard and large glasses that seem to draw his eyes together at the inner corners. He has a quiet but penetrating voice, a sharp wit, and a near total lack of pretension. (When brewing at Dogfish, he has been known to pour himself a chicory stout for breakfast.) He and Calagione first met eight years ago, at a dinner in honor of Michael Jackson, the great British beer writer. McGovern had recently published his findings on King Midas and was hoping to convince someone to make a modern-day replica of the beverage. (Anchor Brewing had done something similar a few years earlier, when it made a beer based on an ancient Sumerian hymn to the beer goddess, Ninkasi.) As it turned out, several brewers took up the challenge and sent beers to his house over the next few months. “Some were pretty good,” he says. “But Dogfish Head’s was the best.”

[iski]

Midas Touch, as it was later called, has a brilliant rose-gold color—every batch contains about a thousand dollars’ worth of saffron—and a thick, honeyed, spicy flavor: a cross between beer, mead, and wine. It has become Dogfish’s most decorated drink, winning a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival, another gold at the International Mead Festival, and a silver at the World Beer Cup. “I look at beers like these as an opportunity to drink history,” Calagione said. “They’re liquid time capsules.”

Earlier that summer, he and McGovern had brewed their most recent project: Theobroma, or “food of the gods.” It was based on Mayan and Aztec ceremonial drinks, and on residues of the earliest known fermented cacao beverage, found in Honduran pots from between 1400 and 1100 B.C. It contained cocoa nibs, ancho chilies, honey, barley, and annatto seeds. “I kept complaining that it needs more chocolate,” McGovern said. “I wanted to make it more reddish, because it was equated with blood and human sacrifice.” Calagione laughed, saying, “And I told him, ‘O.K., I’ll get back to you on that.’ ”

[iski]

Beer is less ancient than wine, McGovern went on to say, because it requires more technology: agriculture to grow the grain, fire and kettles to cook it. But, once invented, it quickly spread. “It wasn’t just in one part of the world,” he said. “It was all over.” If wine was rare and therefore aristocratic—it could be made only once a year, when fruit was ripe—beer trickled down to the working class. All you needed was a little malted grain and something bitter to balance its sweetness. Before barley became the grain of choice, brewers used millet and rice. Even after hops were domesticated, around 700 A.D., they threw in wormwood, henbane, cowslip, ivy, mugwort, bog myrtle, elderberry, oak leaf, laurel leaf, autumn crocus, or wild rosemary. Some plants were poisonous, most were not, and they gave the beer an endless variety of flavors.

The Reinheitsgebot, when Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria imposed it in 1516, had less to do with keeping peasants from poisoning themselves—never a great concern of the gentry—than with controlling the hops and barley crops. It made a virtue of trade restrictions. And beer, that great bouillabaisse of an invention, became nearly as predictable as wine.

[iski]

Extreme brewers are doing their best to help it devolve. This past October, I joined Calagione at the Great American Beer Festival, in Denver, for the première of his Sahtea and Theobroma. The festival was founded in 1982 by a home brewer named Charlie Papazian, when its title still sounded like an oxymoron. “That’s a great idea, Charlie,” Michael Jackson told Papazian, in so many words. “Only what will you serve for beer?” Twenty-six years later, more than eighteen hundred beers were on tap at the Denver convention center. A vast hangar had been divided into booths for four hundred and thirty breweries, grouped by geographic region. Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and Miller had their usual elaborate stage sets, and most beers followed the classic German and English styles. Still, the night belonged to extreme beer.

Wandering through the hall in the hour before it opened, I saw signs for beers called Goat Toppler, Chicken Killer, and Old Headwrecker, Incinerator, Detonator, Skull Annihilator, and the Obamanator. Many were double I.P.A.s that seemed to be competing for the highest I.B.U. rating. But others were faithful re-creations of ancient recipes, or else beers invented from whole cloth. “When you’re making an extreme beer, it’s like pushing beyond the sound barrier,” Jim Koch told me. “All of a sudden, everything is silent. I remember when I first tasted my Triple Bock. It dawned on me that beer has been around for thousands of years, and I am tasting something that no brewer has ever tasted. It was inspiring, beautiful, almost reverential.” Even Garrett Oliver seemed to be bowing to the trend. His booth featured two wonderful bottle-fermented ales and a pale ale called BLAST!, with eight kinds of English and American hops. “No, this is NOT a double I.P.A.,” a sign beneath the tap read. “Even if you believe in those.”

[iski]

The festival was sold out for the first time. Over the next few days, some twenty-eight thousand attendees would pay fifty dollars for a wristband and a small plastic glass for tasting samples. The outcome was predictable. When the doors were flung open at five-thirty, six thousand people barrelled in and began drinking immediately, in great quantity. They wandered around in Viking horns, jester bells, and hats shaped like foaming steins, their bellies jutting from beer-themed T-shirts. One shirt showed Jesus hoisting a frothy mug with the caption “King of the Brews.” To make sure that the noise stayed near the shattering point, a bagpipe ensemble roamed the hall, blasting fanfares at unexpected moments. Whenever there was a lull, some oaf would drop his glass on the concrete floor and the entire assembly—as per tradition—would erupt into an epic whoop.

“It’s amazing how well people behave, given how many are here and how much alcohol there is,” Bob Pease, the vice-president of the Brewers Association, told me. In his sixteen years at the event, he noted with some pride, no one had been killed or seriously injured. But, then, security was pervasive. Uniformed police, private security guards, and hundreds of volunteers prowled the booths, slicing the wristband off anyone who had overindulged. At one point, late in the evening, after I’d stumbled over a power line (or something), I went up to get a free sample. A guard hustled over to the server and muttered, “Go easy on the pour.”

[iski]

Calagione, for his part, had no time to drink. Going to the Great American Beer Festival with him, a friend of his had told me, is like attending a Star Trek convention with Captain Kirk. Wherever he went, beer geeks and fellow-brewers clustered around, taking pictures, handing him books to sign, or taping his greetings on a handheld recorder. The Dogfish booth was mobbed. While most others had five or ten people in front of them, Calagione’s crowd spilled across the concrete till it engulfed the Blue Moon booth across the way. I helped him work the taps for the first half hour, then slipped off with samples of Theobroma and Sahtea.

Like many craft-beer drinkers, I’d started out liking Pilsners and pale ales, and found myself craving more and more hops. The Theobroma managed to satisfy that taste indirectly. It was a lovely amber-colored beer with a hint of bitter chocolate at the beginning and an afterburn of chilies. But despite its ten per cent alcohol, it seemed almost too fainthearted. It was the Sahtea that I loved. For all Selders’s concern, the tea and spices in it hovered politely in the background, leaving the yeast to run the show. Cloudy and golden, with a lush flowering of bananas and cloves, it tasted like something a trader might have sipped a century ago, standing in a colonial market in Ceylon, with open baskets of tea and spices all around. It wasn’t an extreme beer by any stretch, and it certainly didn’t taste Finnish. But it was a time capsule nonetheless.

[TN]

i think i just earned some sort of degree in beer.





hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm  beer

 


TN

[iski]

When the session was over and the booth was packed up, when six thousand drunken revellers had descended on the streets of Denver, and the other Dogfish brewers had followed in search of more beer, Calagione and I walked back to our hotel. “Remember what Patrick was saying that day in his office, about how alcohol affects the brain?” he said. I nodded. McGovern had shown us a paper illustrated with scans of animals’ brains. Alcohol’s emotional effect is unusually complex, he had said. It starts out as a stimulant and only later, when you’ve had a lot, becomes a depressant. Calagione laughed. “Does it work that way for you?” he said. “Because it doesn’t for me. I never get around to the depressant part.”

[miker]

I am now "board" with this thread....

[iski]

I exist, therefore I entertain.




Wood eye bohr ewe?  Already answered, nevermind.

[iski]

[miker]

!

[Talon]

Beer today is nothing like beer from the middle ages, they didn't have hops, so they used thing like oak leaves and other strange ingredients that they could find locally. I'm sure most wasn't that great! Really cool story, I never heard before. I brewed a beer I called whiskey barrel stout, It was to copy an old stout that use to be fermented in old whiskey barrels. I added sterilized oak chips to the fermenter and a cup of whiskey to the bottling bucket for 5 gal. It was really good when young, but as it aged, the oak faded and the whiskey was more pronounced. I gave some to a guy that worked at the American Home Brew Association in Boulder, they really liked it.

I love the Great American Beer Festival, our brew club rented a local bus called Foam On The Range, they did local brew tours, took us to Denver with two other clubs, and we had two kegs on the bus in built in kegaretors. Dropped us right out front, I got to work the home brew booth with Charlie Papazian, author of Joy Of Home Brewing, he was a nice gut. Meet Michale Jackson, the beer and whiskey critic, he was really weird! 1500 different beers, we had a blast!

[miker]

I wood like to drink beer now