Will craft beer ever get back to it's roots?

While there are more "gimmicks" , as you say, now, they are very much in the minority of beers out there. As somebody who has been into craft, or micro as we used to call it, it's an AWESOME time to be a beer drinker!!!

 

Randy Mosher basically questions the "entire Wallonian walnut".

He quoted the source material that he read from the 1800's (which is published in French). He could not find any contemporaneous (1800's written material) that confirms the 'story' that Saison was a beer brewed in the winter time by farmers to provide beverages to migrant workers of the summer/fall harvest season.

He did present information from the early 1900s (e.g., 1920s) which indicated that Sasions were brewed by commercial breweries. He also showed photographs of those brewery enterprises.

Once the NHC presentations are uploaded to the AHA website I will be in a better position to provide you with more details.

If you have some primary source information which confirms the Saison 'story' of the 1800's that would be useful information.

Cheers!

 

As you know, I'm not the historian, I'm just quoting them. There's only so much I can provide. If any site users are familiar with "Traitè Complet de la Fabrication des Bières et de la Distillation des Grains," they should chime in. Even if that text documents such brewing practices, it doesn't mean that the story is true. The nineteenth century source text could be incorrect conjecture just as it's possible that it's the case with the current literature.

Mosher's presentation sounds interesting. I appreciate the term "questions" over "myth" because questioning is appropriate when there's a lack of evidence, but declaring something a myth should involve evidence that proves it to be incorrect.

Randy Mosher and Yvan De Baets can duke this out. That would be a great conversation to listen in on. Did the T-Rex kill it's prey or was it a scavenger? Good luck getting the scientists to all agree. Sometimes facts are just facts until they are disproven by other facts... and the cycle continues without necessarily being any closer to the truth.

Taken in the context of this thread, it doesn't really matter. In 1993, Michael Jackson wrote that contemporary saisons were heavily hopped with imported hops and sometimes dry-hopped. Tank 7 was added here (and elsewhere on the web) in 2009. This doesn't take away from the beer. I mentioned in another post that the US craft scene is more about revivalism than innovation. The fact that a brewery in Kansas City is brewing a "Belgian-style farmhouse ale" is testament to that. As a drinker, I am benefitting from this interest in revivalism.

 

I'd suggest that the term "myth" is appropriately applied both to situations where there is demonstrable proof of inaccuracy and to situations where there is no proof or evidence to support the claim, especially after having looked hard in places where evidence for the claim should be found if the statement is true. Sometimes people make claims that literally can not be falsified, but in those cases the burden of proof rests on the sources of the claim.

To provide a beer related example:

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4586-beer-is-proof-that-god-loves-us-and-wants-us

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/01/prweb494724.htm

As for Tank 7, what seems to me to most noticably unique about it is the use of US hops in the beer rather than imported hops, something which, as we've seen in this thread, some will count as "innovation" and others will not. (All in the noticeable absence of any agreed upon definition of "innovation." )

 

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.It depends what is written about , maybe amateur rustic brewing (which clearly must have taken place throughout the beer drinking world) wasn't deemed worthy of a writer's time.And perhaps with every brewer doing his own thing the whole matter was too divergent to write about anyway.
A parallel could be the IPA which went to India.The fact that twice as much Porter was exported there (that's what the troops drank) at the same time has gone unreported as the troops didn't write the history, the administrators did and they were the ones who drank IPA.So everyone knows about IPA but not the massively hopped porters.

 

According to whom? Is this merely based on an opinion? Or is it actual fact. Sounds an awful bit more like opinion. Here's mine. I think that for brewers such as Sam, these are concepts that become beer. Ditto for Randy Mosher, who has done the historians legwork and written the bible for bent beers and still wishes to poke holes in expectations of what beer can be with his work with 5 Rabbit. Why brew what is expected? Sure, it sells. But that's because people like golden retrievers and black labs. i.e. the expected. There's a lot of other people who are always looking for the new and want the edge to figure out how to not go over. That's America at its best. To reference DFH. That's why Miles Davis went towards albums like Bitches Brew. That's why bands like Grateful Dead allowed for "Space."
I like that breweries are able to design and brew beer around concepts. It doesn't necessarily always mean the beer will be amazing. But, the ideas that come from brewing it provide solid grounding in becoming a better brewer, and the knowledge of having tried. That's a very fascinating innovation that has come about as a result of bending beer into shapes it may have already been in historically and borrowing liberally from what fusion cuisine has long been interested in. Concepts, and the what if of trying.

 

Agreed, and a nice extension of the point I was wanting to make. The parallel is good because it represents exactly a good reason for talking about the IPA myth and why it was a myth only, it ignores part of the available evidence.

The difficult case is where collateral evidence one way or the other may be unavailable or non existent. For example, if there is amateur rustic brewing taking place that was not written about by the contemporaries (many of whom would have been basically illiterate) or the historians close in time to the era under discussion, there often is still other discoverable sources of information that support the inference or not. On the other side, drawing the conclusion that something must have been the case in the absence of direct evidence one way or the other simply because it makes sense, leaves the conclusion questionable and open to debate. An additional complexity is that "Things Change." What may have once been the case is open to evolution and/or gradual changes taking place over time, often with such changes being difficult to see until a "tipping point" occurs and suddenly something apparently new appears.

 

What you may be missing about DFH is that, based on a variety of sources of evidence, DFH does vet most or all their brews with the public before they get pushed over to the production brewery and distribution. In addition they are large enough to employ a professional panel of judges used in taste testing as part of quality control for what does get shipped out the door to distributors. Indeed, there is video evidence of at least one case of them dumping a production beer worth several hundred thousand dollars because it did not pass their taste test standards. Nobody has to like their beers but DFH don't really fit the sterotypes held by many who denigrate them and there is information available to consumers to aid their purchase decisions. I've personally have never tried a DFH beer that I didn't have some advance idea of what it was going to taste like. I still may not have cared for the result, but I had some information in hand before purchase.

 

Understood. I don't have the inside track of how Mr. Hill brews his beers but I can say with a pretty high degree of confidence, back in "the old days" when Saisons came about, some brewers relied quite a bit on wild yeast which creates lactic acid which adds a certain degree of sourness/funkiness in the beer so to me, those lines are more blurred rather than black and white.

 

I wholeheartedly disagree. While there may be some out there that have "jumped the shark", there is a ton of good BA stuff out there. And, it's not just throwing a beer in a barrel and then BINGO- great beer. There's a lot of skill required to do it right.

 

The market/consumer decides what the craft brewer does. Period.

 

The roots of "craft beer" is homebrewing. There are still lots and lots of homebrewers out there, as well as breweries that are strong supporters of their local homebrewing communities. As long as homebrewing remains legal in the US good beer will continue to evolve. See if your local breweries are down with the homebrew community, if they are then you know they're in it for the love of beer and not the love of sales. I think it's a shame when a new brewery opens and I can tell immediately that the owners are just out for a piece of the craft beer market. You can taste it in their beer, no soul. I wish these folks would just choose another market to test out their MBA's. I think that's what you're sensing in the market.

 

I'm alarmed by the elitist tone many of you have regarding beer. There was a time that beer loaded with hops and high in alcohol was considered a gimmick and a deviation from the purity of a lager/ale/pilsner. All beers start out seeming like a gimmick, which is a word I don't particularly like. One-offs and unique beers are how breweries figure out what people really like and what sticks around. there's nothing wrong with experimenting with beer. I say embrace Rogue AND Sierra Nevada. Having a great selection of mundane, interesting, bizarre, and classic beers is what makes this the best era for beer in the history of the world.

If you can't stand the sight of a peanut butter chocolate cream porter, then my advice is to close your damn eyes till you get to the Pale Ale. Taste is subjective. Get over yourself.

 

Thank you for not being so closed minded.

 

My sentiments exactly! For instance, can we please call a beer a Gose, when it is, in fact a Gose? Mini rant over, for now!

 

I'm not saying it's right all the time.. I just don't think barrel aging should be labeled in the same group as the other gimmicks.

 

jzeilinger said: ↑
Understood. I don't have the inside track of how Mr. Hill brews his beers but I can say with a pretty high degree of confidence, back in "the old days" when Saisons came about, some brewers relied quite a bit on wild yeast which creates lactic acid which adds a certain degree of sourness/funkiness in the beer so to me, those lines are more blurred rather than black and white.

What I meant to say was "wild fermentation" as opposed to "wild yeast"; and back in the day sanitization obviously wasn't something they paid attention to and you agree the old school beers had a tendency to be sour regardless of intended or not.

And getting back to my original post - "Accidentally" - So you're saying Hill Farmstead purposely introduces bacteria to some of their beers as a gimmick?

 

So, the riddle me this. If saisons were brewed in Belgian breweries in an era before they had commercial laboratories to sell them cultured yeasts, how did they prevent the presence of lactobacillus along with their yeasts? Lactobacilli are as prevalent as yeasts and are close companions of yeasts in both the "innoculation" by spontaneous fermentation of beer and in making sourdough bread. How did those old guys prevent having lacto in their saisons? What was their secret of making Saisons that didn't have sourness if the beer matured long enough?

 

Your right, what they did in antiquity is lost in time and not the focus of the earlier points made in the thread or posts about saisons. Nonetheless it seems as though any beer brewed in winter for summer consumption under less than "sanitary" conditions would have time to show some sourness when consumed.

Why do you want put the stake in the ground to start "tradition" with say the develoment by Dupont of a saison in roughly the 1920s as a benchmark? Records suggest that saisons existed before Dupont and modern quality control and we could argue that the reasons their saisons are not sour is because of a "gimmick."

Never tried any Fantome but as I've heard their work described I'd put them in the "gimmick" category for their experimentation and their inability to produce a consistent product. And whose to say that their saisons are not typical of what was brewed in small "farmhouse breweries" in Belgium before Dupont, etc.?

 

Until I can't find standard styles of beers on shelves or on tap, e.g. pilsners, APAs, stouts, porters, IPAs, etc, I'm not going to be concerned with brewers making gimmick beers.