Beer in the news

[mr x]

Saskatchewan’s pricier booze leaves people drinking less, study finds

[/b]

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/arti ... tudy-finds" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[jeffsmith]

I've been in a few bars in Saskatchewan and the patrons in each establishment were working very hard to disprove that study.

[canuck]

World's strongest beer.

http://drinkingmadeeasy.com/booze-in-th ... the-world/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[mr x]

Artisan beer is no longer the preserve of men. Jake Wallis Simons meets a new generation of female "brewsters"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink ... e-pub.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[mr x]

The World Atlas of Beer

[/b]
http://life.nationalpost.com/2012/10/27 ... -deserves/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[pet lion]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/foo ... ice=mobile" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Maritime malt and eggy whiffs: What exactly does beer terroir mean?

New Brunswick’s barley is said to have “wet feet” because of the East Coast’s rainy days, unlike the dry, cracking Prairie soil where most Canadian malt is grown. And so when brewmaster Liam McKenna created his Yellowbelly Pale Ale using only “Maritime malt,” he says he could taste the difference.

“Maritime malt has more proteins than a Prairie malt so you get these nutty, strawberry flavours in the beer,” says McKenna, brewmaster at Yellowbelly Brewery and Public House in St. John’s.

As Canada’s microbrewery industry matures, more brewers are demanding local ingredients to give their beer a unique flavour, or – dare I say it – terroir.

But try talking about beer and terroir without brewing up a storm of confusion and controversy. Terroir means different things to different people. “You can’t call that beer part of my terroir,” says McKenna, “because the malt was grown in New Brunswick – that’s not my region.”

The rise of the local food movement in North America means experts are redefining terroir.

“Historically, we’ve always looked to our surrounding regions for inspiration for what we eat and drink,” says Dr. Amy Trubek an anthropologist at the University of Vermont and author of The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. “But our commodity-based food system allows us to pick and choose what we eat based on desire, without paying attention to our relationship to the natural world.” Terroir, says Trubek, restores that critical link.

Before globalization of the beer market, beer had a distinct terroir: It was rooted in the water.

“Some of the great beers in the world were developed on the basis of the local water,” says Dr. Charlie Bamforth, who teaches brewing science at the University of California, Davis.

The gypsum-rich soil of England’s Burton-on-Trent shaped the English Pale Ale because the extremely hard water made a bold-tasting brew with a distinctly “eggy whiff” and a dry finish, says Bamforth. On the other end of the taste spectrum, the Czech town of Plzen’s very soft water is the basis for the round, understated pilsner, made famous by Pilsner Urquell.

“The brutal reality today is that you can adjust the water to anything you want,” says Bamforth, “so you can make the same product in different places around the globe, and it will be an exact match to the original recipe.”

But while most breweries, big and small, doctor their water – there are still many that leave their local source untouched, and the breweries claim its unique composition drives flavour.

Toronto’s Steam Whistle pilsner is made with hard, spring water drawn from a well near Caledon, Ont. For a glimpse of terroir, try it alongside Pilsner Urquell. Steam Whistle’s has a lighter, more bubbly feel than the soft, creamy Urquell, a more pointed hop finish and a slight “eggy whiff.”

“Hard water tends to bring out stronger hop profiles,” says Becky Julseth, co-owner of Salt Spring Island Ales in British Columbia, which draws spring water from the island. “Having soft water allows us to use hops more liberally, for a softer-tasting beer with deep, but not overwhelmingly bitter hop flavour,” says Julseth.

And then there are the other three ingredients that go into beer: malt, hops and yeast.

Unlike most in the industry, Brett Joyce, president of Rogue Ales, thinks it’s the malt and hops that give a beer its unique imprint.

“For me, terroir means the crops that you grow will give your beer a unique taste of place,” he says.

Like most other craft breweries, Rogue’s regular lineup of beer is made with hops and malts imported from all over the world. But for its special “Chatoe” (a tongue-in-cheek butchering of chateau) line, the brewery grows its own hops, barley and fruit in the Willamette Valley, about a 90-minute drive from Rogue’s brewery in Independence, Oregon. As far as Joyce is concerned, only his Chatoe series exhibits terroir. “There’s such a mix of ingredients in our other beers that it’d be hard to put your finger on a distinctive terroir,” he says.

Farming your own ingredients is a laborious, expensive pursuit, and Joyce admits it’s not a stream of his business that makes much money. The bottom line? Grow-your-own makes a great story, but it’s not a realistic business plan for most breweries.

Perhaps the truest imprint of terroir on an ale lies in wilder territory.

Lambic beers can only be labelled as such if they are made in the Senne Valley near Brussels. This medieval style takes a hyper-concentrated wort (the liquid extracted from the mashing process) and leaves it to cool in open vessels in an old brewery. Vents in the walls invite wild yeasts from outside, along with natural bacteria from inside the farmhouse (which is never cleaned, allowing the brewery’s own “house style” of natural bacteria to thrive), to invade the sugary wort and kick-start years of fermentation.

The result is a truly funked-out, puckeringly sour beer. With notes of horse blanket, goat and a long, dry finish, these are some of the most complex beers in the world.

A few weeks ago, Iain McOustra, a brewer at Amsterdam Brewery in Toronto, rounded up three other local brewers to make a “Niambic.” The four men drove their wort out to the Good Earth Winery in Beamsville, Ont., which is surrounded by fruit orchards, and left it outside in “coolships” (shallow, open boxes) for 16 hours. That batch is fermenting away in four unwashed wine barrels from another Niagara winery.

The plan is to brew a new batch annually until the fourth year when, true to style, the four brewers will taste and blend them into Canada’s first lambic-style(ish) brew.

Memorable brews

Find le goût de terroir in these beers

Corps Mort

Located on the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, remote islands in the gulf of St. Lawrence, (a five-hour ferry ride from Prince Edward Island), Quebec microbrewery À l’Abri de la Tempête makes beers with a taste of the Gulf. Each spring, brewers cure malt for this barley wine in the same smokehouse that serves the local herring catch, lending this 11 per cent caramel-forward barley wine a smoky, salty flavour with the distinctly herring finish. Whoa. $6.00/341 ml at the brewery and at dépanneurs throughout Quebec.

Salt Spring Island estate-hopped Whale Tail Ale

Fresh, whole, Cascade hops were picked from the brewery’s farm and chucked into this caramely, biscuity spring-water ale lending it a zingy, grapefruit nose. $6.85/650 ml in stores and on tap in Victoria, Saanich & Salt Spring Island.

3 Fields Harvest Ale

Garrison Brewing created this ale with 100-per-cent Maritime malt and seven varieties of fresh, whole hops from four Nova Scotian farms, which lend bright mango and lychee flavour. $5.49/500 ml, for sale at Garrison Brewery.

[mr x]

The city is embracing English-style real ale like nowhere else in Canada, experts say

[/b]

http://www.thestar.com/living/food/drin ... xperts-say" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[durtydogg]

Thanks for the links...love this thread

[hogie]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story ... froth.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Discovery of beer gene could improve 'foam character'
Researchers identify yeast gene which could lead to the ideal pint

Scientists have found the first gene for beer foam, a discovery which they say will help researchers perfect the frothy "head" atop a freshly poured pint.

Researchers from Spain and Australia say they have identified the yeast gene which helps produce the proteins needed to create bubbly foam, in a study published in the journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

"This novel protein is responsible for beer foam stabilization," the researchers wrote. "This report represents the first time that a brewing yeast foaming gene has been cloned and its action fully characterized... Foam quality is an important organoleptic property of beer that directly correlates to consumer appeal."

Beer is typically made from ingredients including barley and yeast, as well as water and hops. The white foamy top on the popular alcoholic beverage consists of carbon dioxide gas, which is produced by yeast during the fermentation process, and proteins that gather around it creating bubbles.

Past research showed that proteins from the yeast stabilize the ale or lager's foam, which keep the beer's "head" from dissipating quickly.

Similar fermentation genes have been discovered for wine and sake by previous researchers, but, this was the first identification of the beer foam gene, the study says.

The gene is called CFG1, which stands for Carlsbergensis foaming gene, said scientists from the University of Santiago de Compostela and University of Burgos, both in Spain, and the University of Sydney in Australia.

"Although there have been many publications concerning barley proteins involvement in beer foam production … reports on yeast genes involved in beer foam generation and maintenance have been scarce," researchers said.

The scientists examined several yeast strains. One of the tests involved taking samples of beer fermented with different strains in test tubes and comparing the amount and quality of foam after shaking for 5, 15, 30, or 60 minutes.

The researchers say the discovery of the gene CFG1 takes us one step closer to uncovering the perfect pint of ale or lager.

"Taken together, all the results shown in the present paper show the CFG1 gene to be a good candidate to improve foam character in the brewing industry," the study reads.

[CorneliusAlphonse]

further to Hogie's last link...
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2 ... ets-barley

Last month, scientists announced a big breakthrough in barley research: They had finally sequenced the entire barley genome. In response, some media outlets ran stories declaring that this will somehow result in better beer (barley being one of beer's key ingredients). Sure, on some level, understanding the barley genome is going to yield better--or more, or cheaper--beer, especially if climate change goes down the way scientists suspect it will and crops become more difficult to grow due to substandard environmental conditions. But those media stories are missing the point: That kind of better-beer hyperbole is a bit like taking some NASA results from the Solar Dynamics Observatory and saying that the data will help you get a better tan. The implications of the research are much more complex.

Some background: Barley is a member of the tribe Triticeae along with other domesticated grains such as wheat and rye. These crops are among the earliest domesticated agricultural grain products--archeological evidence indicates that humans domesticated barley around 10,000 years ago.

What the International Barley Genome Sequencing Consortium published in the journal Nature last month was a draft--a partially complete map of all of the genes--of the barley genome. It was a remarkable feat, and it took years to overcome the technical hurdles: at 5.1 gigabases, the barley genome is 1.3 times larger than the human genome, and much of the barley genome is made up of repeating sequences, which makes it tough to figure out exactly where all of those redundant sequences go.

The purpose of the work is to, eventually, improve barley so it's more resistant to disease and adverse conditions than current cultivars (specific varieties of barley that are specifically created to have a desirable characteristic), enrich the dietary fiber content of the plant and, yes, probably tweak the kernels so they are more efficient or better for beer production.

But that's a long way off. I spoke with Nils Stein, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Germany and one of the principal investigators on the barley genome project, about the paper. Stein emphasized that what they published is only the very first draft of the genome. They have the physical map--the position of all of the individual letters--but they do not have the position of all of the genes on that map. Basically, that's like knowing where all of the letters are in a novel, but not quite knowing how all of those letters break up into words. The members of the consortium do have some data: They were able to map the positions of 24,154 genes to the physical map, about two-thirds the number of genes (30,400) that barley is suspected to have in total.

In addition to that, they compared the genomes of different cultivars of barley. The main genome sequenced, Morex, is a six-row barley. I asked Stein why they considered Morex the best "baseline," while all of the other cultivars they had examined were two-row barley. He explained that the USDA had done significant research on the Morex cultivar in the past--it is the one about which we know the most, and thus provided a good foundation for further research.
Why should aspiring homebrewers care? Because two-row and six-row barley behave slightly differently in the mash, which can have profound effects on brewing efficiency and characteristics of the finished beer (a complex phenomenon I'll get into in a future column). I figured anyone nerdulent enough to want to know about genetic differences of cultivars would be curious as to which kind of barley was used in the single-nucleotide-variation study.

When consortium scientists compared the various six-row and two-row barley cultivars, they discovered that the chromosomal regions near the centromeres 1.) had many functional genes on them and 2.) did not display a great deal of variation within and, to a certain extent, between cultivars. The upshot is that only the ends of the chromosomes recombine--swap chunks of DNA--frequently. This will be something of a hurdle for future barley scientists to overcome: you can't breed a better, more disease-resistant barley if the genes you need to transfer between cultivars during breeding just won't recombine with each other. Stein did clarify that one could use gene modification techniques to target those difficult-to-access genes near centromeres, and he was also quick to explain that not all of barley's genes reside in those areas--there are plenty of traits that traditional breeders can mess with.

Going forward, Stein wants to more clearly comprehend the position of genes on the physical map and transcriptome--gene products such as protein or regulatory RNA--of barley, which will help scientists better understand how gene expression is controlled. That, in turn, would offer clues on how plant breeders can control gene expression themselves.

Stein also says that barley will make an excellent model genome for understanding related crop plants whose genomes are even more complex: Wheat, for example, is hexaploid (it has six copies of each chromosome; barley has two) and its genome is a massive 17 gigabases large. Like barley, wheat is one of the most important staple foods in the world and the crop will encounter the same environmental pressures--droughts, disease, pests, brackish water, substandard soil--as barley in the face of climate change.

So you can see that teasing out the myriad complexities of an organism's genome and that genome's temporal, spatial and structural organization is a hell of a task--but an important one that can't be summed up in a 200-word news story.

[Dirt Chicken]

is this monsanto doing the research?

[BobbyOK]

The city is embracing English-style real ale like nowhere else in Canada, experts say

[/b]

http://www.thestar.com/living/food/drin ... xperts-say" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

“There’s no way you could do a festival like this in Halifax,” said Kevin Keefe.

Bullshit. Unless of course he was referring to the fact that our laws would never allow it. But if it was allowed, it would be successful.

[mr x]

I don't know what he meant there....is he still trying to do his own festival?

[LeafMan66_67]

http://atlanticcanadabeerblog.wordpress ... rewing-co/

Hell Bay Brewing recently announced expansion plans. I’ve recently exchanged emails with owner Mark Baillie in order to complete this interview.

Atlantic Canada Beer Blogger (ACBB): How did you decide to open a brewery?
Mark Baillie (MB): Opening a brewery or brew pub, was always a thought in the back my mind, since my first time home brewing. My wife and I both having culinary backgrounds, kicked the brew pub idea around for a while before deciding on a production brewery, thinking that we’ll take it one step at a time, as a brewpub really is two businesses rolled into one. So I started looking into how to get started, and how to finance it. The financing became a more challenging obstacle so we started small, with a 30gal. system. That system only lasted about 5 months before we had to up our production to our current system which is a mix of tanks and fermenters we acquired from Paddy’s Pub that include a couple of 300L and 600L fermenters, tanks, etc.

ACBB: How many batches of beer did you make before going pro?
MB: I don’t really know how many batches I brewed before going pro, but I brewed for approx. 10-12 years.

ACBB:Did you have any support from any local brewers in getting your operation started?
MB: When we started we kept everything rather “low key” mainly because of the limited capacity of the brew system.

ACBB: Can you tell me about your current production?
MB: We are currently producing approx. between 12 – 18hl/mo, between 200-300hl/year. We brew 3hl batches at least once a week. We acquired the tanks and fermenters from a local brewpub, and cobbled together everything else, literally, including homemade labeler, bottle washer, stir-plates, and the list goes on.

ACBB: Do you have any plans for any new beers?
MB: I’m always planning for new beers, once we make the move to Liverpool, I’m planning on having 3-4 core brands, the English Ale of course, I’d like to keep a darker beer on as a regular perhaps a stout or the dark cream ale which was well received, and a lighter one we may keep the pale ale for that or create something else and use the pale as a seasonal. And as mentioned a rotating seasonal to keep things interesting.

ACBB: How do you approach recipes for your beers?
MB: New recipes, I will sometimes make a smaller batch (20l) then scale it up, and sometimes (more often) make the full batch. As for resources, I use brewing books that I have acquired of the years, and the internet. I am planning on taking a brewing course from Seibel Institute in the new year, that will also be a valuable resource and foundation.

ACBB: Other than your own beers, what are your favorites?
MB: Other than my beers, I tend to drink the local offerings like Garrison, Rudder’s, Sea Level, and all of the Atlantic Canadian breweries, as well as the other Canadian Craft beers when I can get my hands on a bottle. And that is pretty much it, I’ll try an American or foreign brew every now and then, but when there is so many good beers within our own country I tend to stick to them.

ACBB: Do you use any local supplies for your beer or equipment at your brewery?
MB: We try to use Atlantic Canadian suppliers as much as possible, we get hops in fall from local farmers, and currently have a local wood working shop making tap handles for us, etc.

ACBB: Can you tell me about your expansion plans?
MB: The expansion in Liverpool will entail our current 6hl brewhouse, along with 10 bbl fermenters. Upgraded bottle and kegging systems, and necessary equipment to brew at that scale.With the increased production, we will be able to get our beer on tap in more locations, such as Halifax and elsewhere. Our bottled production will increase as well so we can supply more bars and restaurants and possibly the NSLC. Even with the expansion, we are still a very small operation, so we probably won’t be distributing outside of the province for now.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Check out the Hell Bay website for a description of their English Ale and Pale Ale beers. You can follow them on Facebook and on Twitter ( @HellBayBrewing ).

[canuck]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/foo ... le4764506/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[dean2k]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/foo ... le4764506/

I think the full text of that article was posted somewhere below. But just an FYI guys: if you're locked out of the new Globe and Mail pay wall because you've read your 5 free articles, you can still open the stories by right-clicking on them and opening the link in an incognito session (using Chrome, anyway). Haven't tried it with IE or FF.

[bluenose]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/foo ... le4764506/

I think the full text of that article was posted somewhere below. But just an FYI guys: if you're locked out of the new Globe and Mail pay wall because you've read your 5 free articles, you can still open the stories by right-clicking on them and opening the link in an incognito session (using Chrome, anyway). Haven't tried it with IE or FF.

Thanks for the heads up on the G&M hack!

[mr x]

Fruit-flavoured cider sales grow 80% in a year

[/b]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... sales-grow" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[daniel.campbell]

Hi,

I Work for CKDU radio in Halifax and I'm looking to do a radio piece on Halifax home brewers. If anyone is interested in chatting about what they do fire me an email at daniel.campbell@dal.ca

I'd really like to hear how/why you started and what you like about it! I just use a voice recorder and pre-make the pieces, so not too much pressure on you.

Thanks

[mr x]

Black pale ale: dark forces rising

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... ces-rising" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[BBrianBoogie]

Black pale ale.....aghhh..........enough with this already....aghhh

[mr x]

Don't worry. There'll be a new and worse fad after this one.

Come to think of it, maybe I need to do a black flanders red.

[Graham.C]

Don't worry. There'll be a new and worse fad after this one.

Come to think of it, maybe I need to do a black flanders red.

I was thinking of doing a pale schwarzbier.

[Dirt Chicken]

how bout, a light/dark pilsner?

[RobD]

It should be coming to NS, presumably Premier: http://www.canadianbeernews.com/2012/09 ... -new-beer/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I checked with Premier on this. Should be in by this Friday at the latest.