Denouement, Part 1

Brew School is officially over, and I've made it safely back to Portland, diploma in hand. (Though I promptly left it behind on the Munich-to-Chicago flight, only realizing my mistake after deboarding.) Since I neglected my blog for much of the final weeks in Europe, I've decided to put up some new posts after the fact. Better late than never.

After our final exam, we spent the final two weeks of the course on what Siebel calls the "European Study Tour." In reality, there is little studying but lots of touring, and the brew crew treks across Western Europe visiting breweries, brewing equipment manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, and the like. It is part-networking, part-education, and majority-dream come true for beer geeks. Our trip took us from Munich north to the Hallertau, the world's largest hop growing region, then on to Franconia and west to Dusseldorf and the Germany-Netherlands border. From there we headed toward Amsterdam and then south across Holland. We spent five days in Belgium, mostly near Brussels in the small college town of Louvain/Leuven. From there, we tacked back east into Luxembourg, across Switzerland, and into the Austrian Alps. After two weeks we returned to Munich, full of beer, heavy with schwag from our visits, and tired of spending hours upon hours on our bus. This mega post is my attempt to cover some of the craziness that took up those two weeks.

Monday morning, November 23, we left Munich just after 7 in the morning. As we loaded the bus, Michael Eder, our lead instructor and, now, tour guide, explained that there were only three rules about the trip: leave the bus in good shape; use the WC only in case of emergency ; and don't vomit on the bus.

The first leg of our journey was short: less than an hour north of München is the Hallertau region. Not surprisingly, it is home to the German division of Hopsteiner, one of the world's global players in the hop trade. They've got warehouses and production facilities in all of the world's major hop growing regions, and their Hallertau facility is especially impressive. The centerpiece is a 21-storey warehouse that is refrigerated and fully automated: a storage bin for over fifty million dollars worth of hops. "The comptuer is the only thing that knows where everything in the warehouse is," our guide told us, "it would take us weeks to try and locate a particular order if we had humans doing it."

After a tour of the facility used to produce hop extract products, we jumped back on our bus and headed nine kilometers to their hop pellet plant. Despite the image that Boston Beer and, more recently, SABMiller have propagated of brewers using whole-leaf hops in their beer, most brewers, the world round, use hop pellets. They require less storage space, get marginally better utilization in brewing, are easier to remove after use, and have a longer shelf life. Pellets are made by cooling and crushing whole hops, sieving the powder, and then forming it into pellets.

Our second stop was at Weyermann, the most famous specialty malt producer in Europe. Weyermann's pilsner, cara, and rauch malts are common in American craft beer, and it was when we arrived for dinner that we realized how much they valued us as potential, future customers. Other than a brief fling with the University of North Carolina, I've never really been wined and dined before, but Weyermann set a precedent on the trip that was hard to match, though many of the other breweries and, especially, suppliers tried. For dinner they had prepared a full buffet of Franconian specialties, ranging from smoked meats and fish to cooked porks, huge cheeses platters, chicken, pickled vegetables, roast beef, and more.

To complement the buffet, they served us unending amounts of one of their house beers. Like many maltsters, Weyermann has an in house pilot brewery both for their own internal use and to test recipes for their customers. Bamberg is the home of smoked beer (rauchbier), which is a rare style that includes a portion of malt that has been smoked over a beechwood. The result is a beer that has flavors of smoked meat and barbecue. It's certainly not a flavor that wins over all beer drinkers, and it's not meant to be consumed in huge quantities, but when used judiciously, smoked malt can add a unique and complex flavor to any traditional beer style. Weyermann is famous for its rauch malt, and their in-house version was one of the best versions of the style that I've ever had. Unlike many American copycats of rauchbier, the Weyermann version (as well as the one at the Schlenkerla brewery that we tasted later in the night) was very restrained in its smokiness and paired beautifully with many of the cold meats, cheeses, and breads.

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After a night in Bamberg, we headed west to visit Ziemann-Bauer, a major manufacturer of brewing tanks, who recently had designed the equipment for the expansions at breweries like New Belgium and Dogfish Head. From there, we continued west to Dusseldorf, home to another of Germany's great beer styles: alt.

Alt is, next to pilsner, the hoppiest of German beer styles. It is an ale, fermented and lagered like a bottom-fermenting beer. The best alts have a distinctive hop flavor and aroma to match a strong malt presence. Dusseldorf is home to the few breweries that still make alt, and the city and style are nearly synonymous. During our visit, we managed to sample alts from three different breweries in town and were able to see the unity and diversity within the style.

Last year, Michael had taken over as the director of brewing operations for Uerige, a small brewpub that has produced alt for centuries in the city's Altstadt, so it was only logical that we head there to see his brewery first. There, we found a brewery that mixed some very antique brewing technology--an open coolship for settling out hot break, an open-plate heat exchanger for cooling, barrels that are bunged and unbunged by an old Portuguese boxer--with world class bottling, fermentation, and distillation equipment. Their in-house alt was noticeably hoppier and lighter-bodied than the others we tasted in Dusseldorf and had a spiciness that came from having been aged in a wood barrel.

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"When it's Monday, you can look out the window of your house and see who's going to be arriving on Friday," Michael quipped when we crossed into the low-lying farmland of the Netherlands. In contrast to the landscape, the Heineken brewery outside of Amsterdam (not to be confused with the Heinken "Experience," a Disney-esque experience in the capital) stands apart. Heineken is the world's third largest brewery, and for all of us, this plant was the largest we had ever visited. Indeed, between the 25 or so American brewers in the class, it's unlikely that we all, during our entire careers as brewers, will produce as much beer combined as the Heinken facility does in one day. The intimidation factor was compounded by an eerie, and perhaps regrettable, characteristic of the brewhouse: it was brewerless.

The technical director, who gave us our tour, explained that his proudest accomplishment at Heinken was by reducing the number of brewers by over 60%. The 60 or so people who still were employed as brewers worked rotating shifts in a control room for the fully automated facility, each completing one specific task--their area of expertise that had kept them from getting cut when the brewing team was reduced from 165 to its current state. "We measure brewhouse efficiency in how much beer we produce per FTE," the technical director explained, "and we want to be the most efficient brewhouse in the world. Plus, most brewers just sit around all day and plan the next barbecue."

This, of course, was not encouraging or inspiring for aspiring brewers. "At least they gave us a USB drive," one of my classmates said as we reboarded the bus.

It did not, however, take long for our faith to be restored. We crossed the Netherlands quickly, heading south for the Belgian border and stopped for the evening about 20 kilometers north in Tilburg. It is home to the Brouwerij de Konigshoeven, also known as La Trappe, one of the most singular monasteries in the world.

Monastic brewing is one of the most celebrated traditions in the world of fermentation. The cloister breweries throughout Germany and Belgium have guarded and maintained many of the world's most revered brewing techniques. And amongst, monk brewers none are esteemed higher than the Trappists. There are only seven Trappist breweries in the world, all purveyors of the classic Abbey styles of beer--ales that were brewed to high strength to substitute for food during times of fasting. Six of the seven are in Belgium; La Trappe is the seventh. Clearly, our visit to the monastery was a beery pilgrimage, but after our morning experience, it was a source of inspiration as well.

Given the rigors of daily prayer, the monks themselves are only present for some of the work demanded in a modern brewery. The lay brewmaster toured us around the grounds, showing us abbeys, chapels, a brewhouse with cathedral-like archways, and a barrel-room that would be the envy of many an American craft brewer. He also explained that in addition to the brewery, the monastery had an on-grounds bakery and was planning on starting a cheese-making operation as well. What's more, the monks also employed many disadvantaged locals to tend the grounds and aid in their greenhouses. "Maybe that's where all of the unemployed Heineken brewers ended up," someone suggested.

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When we crossed into Belgium the next afternoon, there was an air of excitement hitherto unseen amongst everyone. Perhaps it was the knowledge that we were, at least temporarily, free from the conservatism and restrictions of the Germany Purity Laws; perhaps it was the idea that we were slated to visit breweries that are famous worldwide. Perhaps we felt like we were in a land of kindred spirits.

American brewing has taken liberally from all three of the great European brewing traditions. Most of our classic American styles are hopped-up versions of English ales; American macro lagers are watered down version of German lagers. But it has been from Belgium that New World craft brewers have learned to experiment in the way that sets American beers apart. less concerned with precision than German brewers or drinkability than English ones, Belgian brewers have always been the bete noires of the world's brewers, always playing with new ingredients, spices, wild yeasts, fruit. It doesn't hurt that they have a great proclivity for brewing beer that's high in alcohol content as well. Indeed, Belgian beer is the original "big beer."

And our first stop was not to disappoint. Like our visits in Bamberg and Dusseldorf, we headed straight to the source of one of Belgium's classic styles: Duvel Moortgat. Duvel, Flemish for "devil," is the original strong Belgian golden ale. Brewed to 17 plato and 8% alcohol, it looks like a pilsner and has the strength of a big IPA or barleywine. In addition to sharing some of the secrets of how Duvel is brewed, Dimitri, the brewmaster, gave us free reign of the tap room for an hour after the tour. Kids in a candy store, of course, do not get drunk, which meant that the scramble to taste the wide variety of Belgian styles Duvel made--complex fruit beers, sour browns, abbey style tripels and dubbels, a wit and of course Duvel itself--scaled up in enthusiasm and slop by the hour's end. It had taken four days, but on our ride to the hotel, the bus's bathroom finally found itself in use.
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We spent Thanksgiving night in Leuven, substituting moules-frites and sour beers for turkey. With the help of BeerAdvocate and a copy of the Good Beer Guide to Belgium, we discovered the back alley cafes with enviable beer cellars and extensive draft lists that make beer lovers weak in the knees.

But nothing, nothing, as beer lovers and brewers could match Friday. Our itinerary took us into Brussels, only 25 km from Leuven, to the Brasserie Cantillon and Drie Fonteinen, two of the few breweries in the world dedicated to making lambic.

What, exactly, is lambic, and why is it so rare? One of the first things that initiates learn about beer is that there are basically two types of beer: ale and lager. In fact, there is a third: lambic. Whereas ale and lager are brewed from cultured yeast, lambics are beers created entirely through spontaneous fermentation. In the brewhouse, lambics are prepared like any other beer--though aged hops are used as opposed to fresh hops; but after cooling, lambics are left in a shallow tank overnight in a room with open windows so that nearby microorganisms can "contaminate" the beer and infect it. Bacteria and wild yeast that brewers keep out of other beers at all cost are invited to take over in a lambic. This means that funky, sour flavors develop and, because it's a far slower fermentation, the beer takes years to make. After a night open to the elements, the wort is transfered to wooden barrels and left unbunged so that a still, young lambic is produced. Straight lambic is aged anywhere from 1 to 3 years, and then either blended together to make gueuze or mixed with fruit to make beers like kriek and framboise. Because of its odd flavors and the intensive labor required to make it, lambic had, until recently, been relegated to a teensy corner of the Belgian beer world. It is still a boutique product, but it is making a comeback. Cantillon and Drie Fonteinen were both essential to its survival and recovery.

Cantillon is a museum-brewery, subsidized by the Belgian government, and they make some of the most exotic mixed lambics in the world: rhubarb lambic, dry-hopped gueuze, apricot lambic, amongst others. As we toured the dusty, cobweb-ridden facilities ("An army of spiders protects beer from the insects that want to get into the barrels; that is the second way that we depend on nature to make lambic," our tour guide explained), it became clear that we were in a brewery unlike any other in the world.

Our afternoon visit to Drie Fonteinen was equally inspiring. Armand Debelder, the master blender and brewer, at "3F" told us the tragic story of how a broken thermostat caused him to lose huge amounts of gueuze earlier this spring and, effectively, had prevented him from brewing more. Now, buying barrels from other breweries and blending, Armand explained the intricacies of developing a palate for blending different threads of lambic to produce an excellent beer. "Et voila," he said handing all thirty-five of us glass after glass of from his few remaining house-brewed lambics. As president of the lambic makers guild, Armand took it upon himself to inspire us to return to the US and help spread the gospel about gueuze. Indeed, his order to go forth and brew the greatest beer in the world made for a fitting end to our first week of touring.

As we boarded the bus and headed back to Leuven for the evening, I turned to one of my classmates, and we started talking about the weekend ahead. What were we going to do in Belgium? At the very least, we were to seek out more lambic and gueuze.