Defiant brewing determination

Promptly going out and buying 55 pounds of pilsner malt ... Consider that the homebrewer equivalent of getting back on the horse that bucked you.

Fresh from his trip to the Samuel Adams LongShot homebrewer contest, “ESB” Dave Pobutkiewicz is saddling up again. He has a score to settle.

Dave’s maibock, or helles bock ( pick a label), took him from Pompton Lakes, NJ, to Denver and the final round of LongShot judging at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival. But that’s where things sort of stop. Notice we said "stop," not "end."

The judges opted to not include Dave’s brew in next year’s LongShot sixpack (which Boston Beer will brew and send to package stores near you beginning next February). That distinction goes to a double IPA by Mike McDole of California, a weizenbock from Rodney Kibzey from Illinois, and a grape ale from Boston Beer employee Lili Hess. (A Samuel Adams staff homebrew competition is part of the LongShot contest, if you recall. )

But back to Dave.

Ask him what he’ll enter in 2008, and he’ll say that he’d rather not say, revealing only that every beer style category is fair game.

He’s an experienced homebrewer with plenty of honed recipes that have won over an array of contest judges (in state and regional competitions) and colleagues in his club, the Defiant Homebrewers, whose members, by the way, have done well in past versions of the LongShot contest, but still find that top prize – the sixpack – elusive.

Dave thinks he can remedy that. He is, after all, a Defiant Homebrewer. And that 55 pounds of malt is a good start.

NOTE: Special thanks to Russ Pobutkiewicz for the photos of Dave with Boston Beer's Jim Koch (top) and Dave during an interview (above).

Throwing your beer a curve, Part 2

The taste-test results are in.

That new, curvy Samuel Adams pint glass won’t make your favorite Jersey-brewed beer taste like champaign.

It will, however, help the beer taste more like what it was intended to, complementing the flavors and aromas of malt and hops. But a word of warning to you fans of big beers: The glass seems to wreck their flavor profile. More about that later.

A quick recap:

Boston Beer Company created this tulip-meets-shaker pint glass for its flagship Boston Lager after some R&D by some topnotch beer palates and technical minds. Folks at Samuels Adams stick to their proviso that the glass is intended for their lager’s malt profile and Hallertauer Mittelfrüh hops.

Fair enough -- their glass and their beer. (Their marketing, too.) But we suspected what’s good for their lager could be good for our bitters.

So we put the glass through the paces, pitting it against the sturdy and bar-ubiquitous shaker pint glass, enlisting the sensory help of Flying Fish head brewer Casey Hughes and two of his crew -- brewer Tim Kelly and cellarman Frank Winslow. The Fish’s brewing operations chief, John Berardino, also popped in with some observations.

(Note: Both John and Casey were skeptics. John: Looks too much like a vase and its undulations rob the beer of a uniform appearance when held up to light; also looks tough for bars to clean quickly and slip back in their rotation. Casey: Chatter about the glass sounded like a lot of hype; wonder how it stacks against a Chimay glass …)

For the test bench, the Jersey brews sampled were: Cricket Hill’s East Coast Lager, Climax Brewing’s Extra Special Bitter and Flying Fish’s HopFish India Pale Ale.

Carrying things out a few more decimal places, so to speak, we also tasted a great, 8% ABV whiskey barrel-aged version of the Fish’s Belgian Abbey Dubbel. (And we can't wait to leisurely sip this baby again.)

The findings
Generally speaking, the Sam Adams glass topped the shaker pint, providing:

• Cleaner malt and hop aromas
• Readily noticeable malt flavors (unlike an initial bitterness you got drinking from the shaker pint)
• An overall support for the delicate flavors of the beers

Yes, these are the pretty much the same claims Boston Beer makes about the glass. But it’s what we tasted and what we found to be the case.

Another observation: Your palate won’t tire with the Sam Adams glass. For that, you can credit a laser-etched ring on the bottom. It triggers a constant stream of CO2 bubbles over the life of the pint to produce aromatics. (Chimay’s Belgian beer glasses have similar etching to create the same effect.)

Now, about those high-gravity beers ... The shaker glass and its wide V-shape proved friendlier to the Fish’s dubbel, holding the alcohol-warmed malt flavors and fruity aromatics in a tighter integration of pleasing sensations.

Not so with the Sam Adams glass.

It slammed the nose and palate with the booze, a jet stream of alcohol heat that shut out the vanilla notes that should have come from the oak barrel aging. The alcohol in that dubbel is a flavor that should do more weaving and less sensory cleaving. (For comparison sake, we also sipped an Old Ale from Sam Adams’ LongShot sixpack and got pretty much the same impression from that 10% ABV beer.)

Overall, says Casey: "For what the glass was made for, it does very well and complements a variety of beers ... styles that are hoppy and malty but don't have the extreme alcohol."

And, just for kicks …
On our own, we put the Sam Adams glass through a separate test, using River Horse Brewing’s ESB, Flying Fish’s Farmhouse Summer Ale and a black and tan made from Guinness and the Fish’s summer seasonal.

The results were largely the same as with the first round of sampling. But the black and tan was really interesting, a blend of Guinness tang swirling with Summer Ale tang and a tinge of its malt sweetness, all up front but nicely giving way to some slightly muted hop flavor in the Summer Ale. (The head was kind of cool, too, a tan-against-white froth. And by the by, the Summer Ale was excellent by itself in the Sam Adams glass.)

So why all the fuss over a pint glass?
Because beer has such a range of flavors that it deserves some an attention toward capturing and enriching those flavors. Plus, matching the proper glass to a beer is a common practice in Europe.

As it should be here, too.

NOTE: We're not going to offer a buying recommendation. But we will point out the glass is priced at $30 for a set of four, with shipping to New Jersey and tax boosting the grand total to nearly 41 bucks.

Throwing your beer a curve, Part 1

There’s something about beer in a glass.

It’s inviting and relaxing, mesmerizing almost, as it settles beneath a foam crown, bubbles rising.

It’s a siren in the classical sense.

So when we heard Boston Beer Company (aka Samuel Adams) was shaking up the reliable pint glass, giving it the heave-ho in favor of a new 16-ounce model styled for its Boston Lager, we were suitably curious.

After all, the sturdy, simplistic shaker glass is practically the icon of poured beer. It blew the chunky, workhorse mug of our fathers’ generation off the bar years ago to become the alpha glass.

But this new Sam Adams glass … it has starlet curves. And we wondered if it would make the shaker pint a Sony Walkman in an iPod world.

For some answers, we turned to Boston Beer.

And happy to explain what was on their minds by commissioning the design, engineering and manufacture of the glass was brewing manager Grant Wood (a different Grant Wood, but an American artist in his own right, albeit in the media of malt and hops).

With a dozen years at Boston Beer, Grant has a hand in the 20-plus beers produced under the Samuel Adams brand. So he knows beer.

And if he’s not practicing what he preaches -- drinking what he’s brewing -- he may be inclined to sip a Belgian beer, a lambic perhaps. So he does peer through the bent-back tulips, so to speak, to see how the other half lives (if you don’t mind a Beatles metaphor).

That said, two of our key questions to Grant were:

Our old friend, Shaker Pint, you got a problem with it? (Pardon the phrasing, but this is New Jersey, you know.)

And …

If the new glass is good for a Boston Lager, what about a Princeton brewpub porter?

Second question first.

Grant says the new glass -- a fusion of the shaker pint and the tulip glass typically associated with some Belgian beers -- was indeed tailored for the Boston Lager, its malt profile and noble hops. Even among Samuel Adams’ stable of brews, the new glass is the province of the Boston Lager.

So, we surmise that for Garden State beers, we’re on our own, and our mileage is probably going to vary.

And to our other question, Grant says there’s no problem with the shaker pint. It has done quite a functional job at the bar. But …

“You can do better, and I think we proved that with this particular glass,” he says.

The devil is in the details. And that’s where the difference between curvy newbie and shaker pint comes in, Grant says. It’s the nuances of flavor and aromatics and how and when you encounter them. Smell then taste, sweet before bitter, and a dynamic in which that can continue over the life of a pint. (Smelling is a compass for the taste buds. The nose knows, and it delivers more than half of your flavor sensations.)

Some test tasting zeroed in on the shortcomings of other glassware.

The shaker pint wasn’t well suited for capturing aroma. “Especially when you get to the bottom of glass,” Grant says. Pilsner glasses and their tall V-shapes were worse, generating a lot of bubbles and allowing the beer to warm quickly. They were like chimneys “and aroma wafted away faster,” he says.

But the new glass -- Grant confesses he was an early skeptic -- and its somewhat double-goblet shape offered a different experience.

When you sip from it, he says, the rolled tulip lip fits to the mouth and puts the beer to the front of your tongue, so you taste maltiness, that sweet before hop bitter. (Reminder: He is referring to drinking a Sam Adams Boston Lager.) And, Grant says, he anticipated hop aroma, but the new glass also provided enhanced malt aroma. (Remember, the nose knows and the importance of that.)

The glass is also laser etched on the bottom, some engineering work that keeps feeding bubbles. The result is sustained beer aromas. (We’d like to reiterate that nose comment.)

It should be noted that Boston Beer wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, just create a glass for beer drinkers that brings out the best in its best-known brew, a “next step to bringing them to beer nirvana,” as Grant says.

He hopes the glass is something for other brewers to look at, perhaps consider, even if it’s just across beer culture.

So maybe it’s not autumn for the shaker glass after all, just a nice set of curves set on the bar that can make one beer better and beer in general more fun.

And for us …

Accepting what Grant and others at Boston Beer say about the new glass and the beer it was designed for (and we’ve enjoyed a Boston Lager from it), we’re still curious about how a Jersey ESB or IPA would fare within its contours.

Stay tuned. We’re going to find out.

NOTE: Boston Beer is providing the new glasses to its better draft beer accounts nationwide. So you could see it show up in the rotation at your favorite bar. It's also for sale in sets of four from Boston Beer (check their website), so you don't have to return to those days of slipping your server a sweeter tip so she'd look the other way as you swiped a glass.