Something's Brewing
St. Charles Avenue Magazine Food Column, October, 2004
By Michael Depp

A memory from my olfactory scrapbook: Summer in Dublin. Evening (Any evening. Every evening.) The quayside traffic thins, and from the colossal Guinness Brewery just a few blocks across the Liffey from where I’m staying the exclamatory smell of hops wafts over to envelop the entire north of the city in a stouty haze. (The Jameson’s distillery was just a few blocks in the other direction. It was a good summer.) I recalled images of a cartoon animal floating behind the scent of some freshly baked pie as much of Dublin seemed to float into its pubs, inspired by the Guinness Greenhouse Effect to spend another evening in the warm embrace of the national beer culture.

Flash ahead to New Orleans, recently, and Mike “Elvis” Karnowski, owner of Brew Ha-Ha, an Uptown store that supplies home brewers with their needs, tells me a joke: “What’s the difference between American beer and making love in a canoe? Both are f---ing close to water.”

On the whole, I’m sadly inclined to degree, and a peek into my fridge would much more likely reveal a vista of bottles bearing the labels of Guinness, Bass, Harp’s, McEwan’s or Hoegaarden than Bud or Coors. This is not to say that the American landscape is entirely devoid of quality brews, but to put a relevant disclaimer up front: We are a country of mass marketed beers, high volume turnover, trafficking in the familiar. Distributors aren’t particularly interested in niche markets and selling only five to 10 cases of a relatively unknown brew to a retailer. Which is why you will probably not find a bottle of Fraoch heather ale at your local supermarket, while you will readily see Babeling towers of Bud.

That said, I have two suggestions for you this October, Oktoberfest, the month of beer itself. The first is that many good beers are among us, beers brimming with nuances and the tinctures of fruits, chocolates, afternoon sunlight on golden fields, honey. Keep your eyes open. Ask the proprietor of your favorite public house. Be brave, and try them.

My second suggestion, slightly bolder, but more voguish of late with recent attention from The New York Times on the subject: Try pairing beers with your meals instead of wine. This advice will probably soon be obvious with the publication of what is likely to be a seminal tome on the subject – Garrett Oliver’s The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food (Ecco 2003) – but word travels slowly, and knee jerk suspicions of beer’s place at a well-heeled table inevitably arise. Won’t it be too filling? Will it run roughshod over dishes’ flavor? What’s next – saying it’s OK to put your elbows on the table? (Answers: Not necessarily, no and elbows have been finding their way to the table’s edge for some time now.)

Before elaborating on pairing, though, a very truncated primer on beer itself: It is comprised of four essential ingredients – water, malted barley, hops and yeast. It can be top fermented (ale) or bottom fermented (lager), among other methodologies, the yeast working its magic differently in each case. Yeast tends to float to the surface and form a crust for ales during fermentation, making for fruitier, breadier flavors. Bottom fermented lager yeasts, which coagulate and sink, are smoother without a lot of extra flavoring. Alcohol content in beer generally ranges between three-11 percent, the later tending to come from far-flung Belgian monasteries with a (literal) religious zeal about their beers. Oh, and people have been making beers since about 3,000 B.C., when the Sumerians had an early take on the process, according to scholars.

Five thousand years later, Dan Stein, cheese monger and informal beer expert at Martin Wine Cellar Uptown, surveys the beer aisle like a man standing before a prized library of carefully selected rare books (with a few bestsellers in the mix for good measure – and reliable sales). He zeroes in on the Belgian beers, which are among the most popular with customers there, pointing out that Hoegaarden (the best known and biggest seller) is made with unmalted wheat (a violation of the German Purity Law for brewing, strictly speaking); and noting that Belgians add coriander, orange rind and even candy sugar to their brews for flavor and depth (try the beer first before you drop that lemon in, he advises). Belgians, the world’s largest per capita consumers of beer, are also the world’s biggest beer iconoclasts.

Martin Wine Cellar has more than 200 beers in stock, most hailing from Belgium, Germany and the U.S., and I highly recommend picking Dan’s brain for suggestions if you go. I must also relay one point he was particularly emphatic about in the beer-pairing arena: Beers are particularly well matched with cheeses (both are made through fermentation, after all). Dan will be very eager to steer you in the right direction there.

In the French Quarter’s Crescent City Brewhouse, meanwhile, there’s a year-round emphasis on pairing the right brew with dishes, not to mention a dramatic daily display of the brewing process itself. Having recently finished an annual brewmaster’s dinner, general manager Philip Gilberti explained he was now gearing up for Beer Fest in the last week of September (coinciding with the first weekend of Oktoberfest in Germany), and that the month of October would be replete with German dishes and lots of Oktoberfest beer to go with them (a lower alcohol, darker malt best paired with spicier, peppery dishes and consumed in abundance, lederhosen optional).

There are four house beers regularly in the Brewhouse’s arsenal, brewed under the direction of owner/head brewmaster Wolf Koehler – pilsner (the most popular and easiest to drink), Red Stallion, Black Forest, Weiss (wheat) beer, plus a monthly special brew. And while the menu offers useful pairing suggestions, the real entertainment in the 19^th century building, a former tanner, is bearing witness (olfactory and otherwise) to the brewing process itself.

While the din of mashing – combining water and ground malt – churns like a ceaseless engine behind the bar, the liquid, or wort, is filtered through a lautering process, the wort then combined with hops, boiled and cooled. Over the next week, the yeast does its work of converting the malt’s sugar to alcohol and CO2 in the fermentation process, which takes place on the brewery’s upper level, where it also matures over the next three to five weeks, never seeing the light of day until it hits your glass at the brewery’s tap.

If the process itself is something you find intriguing, I’d also advise talking to Elvis at Brew Ha-Ha, as he is generally considered to the dean of local brewing and the principal supplier for the area’s few hundred home brewers. He is also a beer cynic, and can point you to bars where the lines are kept adequately clean and the beer is best cared for (for selection and care of its brews, d.b.a. is his favorite, incidentally).

So keep your wine glasses on the shelf this month. Take out the stein and the pint glass, and give over to hops and malt, the sly tricks of Belgian Trappist monk brewers and the challenges to your palette of pairing a well-made beer with your food.