A winter without icebock

In Kulmbach, Germany, the Bavarian locale said to be the birthplace of eisbock, it's a bitter -2 degrees Fahrenheit today, with a forecast high of 10 degrees. Over the next couple of days it's not going to get much warmer, not breaking out of the teens.

That's perfect weather for turning doppelbock into its richer, bigger alter ego, eisbock: exposing the kegged beer to the elements, letting it partially freeze and drawing off a core of concentrated beer from an outer layer of ice.

Four thousand miles across the Atlantic, here in New Jersey, that's what High Point Brewing, makers of the Ramstein brand, has been doing since the year 2000, turning its 9.5% ABV Winter Wheat Doppelbock into a velvety eisbock, strong but balanced and smooth, a few ticks higher in alcohol.

But not this year.

The uncharacteristically mild winter of 2012 has thawed any hopes this season of having Ramstein Ice Storm, the name of High Point's draft-only eisbock. It's simply been to warm, says High Point owner Greg Zaccardi.

Icestorm is the casualty of a dearth of consecutive days dropping down to the 20-degree temperature range (or colder) needed to produce the beer that the Butler brewery has made annually as gesture of appreciation to its loyal followers.

"It's not a profit-making beer. It's really a beer we do to say thank you to the year-round fans," Greg says.

The weather truly has the final say.

"It's not some phony marketing ploy," he says. "We really have to rely on Mother Nature to get involved in the brewing process and bring us enough cold weather to make the beer possible. We don't use some alternative form of refrigeration. It's done in the real traditional German way."

Ordinarily by now, Ice Storm would be in the sixtels. Last year, a snowy winter with plenty of cold days, High Point took the unprecedented step of brewing 15 barrels of wheat doppelbock specifically for making eisbock.

That was the initial plan for this year, but heavy demand for the doppelbock meant a portion of the final batch of the seasonal run, brewed around Christmas, would be needed to meet draft orders for wheat bock.

By last week, with a continued upswing in temperatures to 50 and even 60 degrees, all bets were off on the eisbock. The remaining Winter Wheat would remain just that – Winter Wheat.

"This year a lot of people are happy they don't have to shovel their driveway out 15 times. The price for that is, we're not able to make eisbock."

Signs of spring, talk of winter

Forget groundhogs as harbingers of spring.

Here's a sure sign that winter will make its scheduled hand-off: a collection of green Post-It notes stuck on the production calendar at High Point Brewing.

The notes read maibock.

Yes, spring is coming. So is that maibock, officially on March 12th at an open house at the brewery in Butler. There are 30 barrels of it fermenting right now, brewed at the end of last week, the headwaters of a planned run of eight 15-barrel batches, already pre-sold to Ramstein draft accounts.

But as much as there is a longing for spring, there's still a reason to talk about winter: High Point saw some firsts with its current versions of Winter Wheat Doppelbock and Ice Storm eisbock, some minor but noteworthy circumstances that illustrate how hot craft beer continues to be nationally and in New Jersey.

For starters, High Point dedicated two 12-barrel batches of its multi-tank run of the winter wheat exclusively for freezing and concentrating into Ice Storm, the Ramstein brew (12% ABV) in the Aventinus vein that has grown from a one-keg experiment eight years ago to a wildly popular beer that's expensive to make, sells out fast and has helped underscore the Ramstein brand. (This should give you an idea of the cost involved with producing Ice Storm: those 24 barrels of winter wheat doppelbock yielded 8 barrels of eisbock after freezing part of the water content and drawing off the remaining concentrated liquid.)

"This year we made more eisbock than we've made in the cumulative amount of time that we've ever made it. For the first time, we actually brewed batches of winter wheat that were dedicated solely to becoming eisbock," High Point founder/owner Greg Zaccardi said last Saturday, a snowy day that saw a steady stream of beer enthusiasts swing by the brewery for sample tastes and to get growler fills.

"This batch that's on now never was served as winter wheat. It was converted to eisbock, and that's a new thing for us. And the reason for that is we had so much demand for it that it made a lot of sense to just focus on it."

Then there's this: High Point bottled only a tiny fraction of the winter wheat doppelbock this year – 10 or 15 cases to have sixpacks on hand during its release open house last year – leaving the lion's share as draft. To be sure, the backbone of High Point's business has been draft beer; the winter seasonal is among only three of High Point's dozen beers that get bottled. But the brewery's tilt toward draft business is growing, and it signed on with Micro-Star keg service last year to ensure an ample supply of half barrels.

"This year the decision to not bottle was essentially (draft) pre-orders," Greg says. "This was the first year we really never did a substantive quantity bottling. Normally we do hundreds of cases.

"We always wanted to be at least 65 percent draft. Since we started with Microstar, we're up to about an 80-20 ratio," Greg says. "The more draft beer we can do, in my opinion, the better it is. It's a 100 percent reusable container; there's a lot less waste in terms of beer spillage going through the bottling line ... the system is set up to have better turnover, better management of draft beer than bottled beer. The consumer has a better chance of getting a very good draft beer than a very good bottled beer."

The draw of seasonal brews can't be ignored, either. Ice Storm is "wow factor" kind of beer, Greg says. "At this point if you really want to make something special and make an impression in the community you have to do something that is wow," he says. It's a situation that seems to steal the thunder from brewers' year-round labels, but you probably won't hear many complaints.

"As a brewer you really want to put all of your energy behind a couple of flagship beers, seasonals being something to mix it up, to accent your core brands," Greg says. "But it's not only me; it seems that Sam Adams and a lot of my contemporaries have a lot of more excitement when it comes to their seasonal releases than their core brands."

But just as seasonals have been helping brewers' bottom line, so have the rising number beer bars in New Jersey and in neighboring states. That's enabled High Point to grow (up 15 percent for the business year that ended last month) in a smaller sales market than it served a dozen years ago. It's also translating into some planned expansion this year, a couple of 30-barrel tanks due to come on line at the end of the spring.

"There's a lot more taps available, a lot more tap space available. There are places that normally wouldn't carry a sixtel of craft beer but have given it a try, and now they have two sixtels that they rotate through, in a place that's a beer and a shot joint," Greg says. "That didn't exist 10 years ago. Even the specialty beer bars these days didn't exist. If they did, what was exotic was Molsen and Bass; it wasn't a local craft."

A beer book built around flavors

Three years ago, during an interview with the US Beer Drinking Team at a Beer Institute gathering, Boston Beer's Jim Koch was asked what beer he'd drink if his Samuel Adams brand were unavailable to him. Deflecting the question, Koch said, "I'll remember what my (brewmaster) dad said, 'Jim, all beer is good. Some beer is better, but all beer is good.' "

Craft beer writer Andy Crouch of BeerScribe – he's also a BeerAdvocate columnist and a Boston-area lawyer – doesn't necessarily share his fellow New Englander's take on beer as a whole.

"I don't know that all beer is necessarily good," he says during a telephone interview. But Crouch, whose new book, Great American Craft Beer (Running Press), hit the shelves in August, says there is some really great beer being made in nearly every state of the US these days, in practically every compass point. A much wider reach than its predecessor, The Good Beer Guide to New England (2006, University Press of New England), Crouch's latest book navigates the American brewing landscape in more than 300 beer profiles that will surely tempt readers to reach for a brew along the way.

And for those keeping score, among the 200 or so breweries spotlighted in Great American Craft Beer, New Jersey's Flying Fish (and its 2008 GABF silver medal-winning Abbey Dubbel) and High Point Brewing (Ramstein Classic and eisbock) get mention among the profiles and style notes.

Andy took some time last week for a Q&A, discussing how the US has become a brewing nation like never before and reminding us that some beers can be appreciated for their fewer – not more – ingredients.

BSL: Why did you write this book?
AC: I'd written a previous book called The Good Beer Guide to New England. That was a travel guide to the region in which I live. And then I wanted to write Great American Craft Beer, I wanted to try and broaden the audience for American craft beer, break beer down, not so much by style and incredibly geeky detail, but do it in a way that was much more approachable for people, build a book around flavor, flavors that people are already familiar with. I think we got to do that with this book. I'm hoping the public agrees and enjoys it as well.

BSL: This may seem like a silly question, but you actually did taste every single beer that's profiled in the book ...
AC: The book is based upon beers that I have tasted over the past 10 years or so. I've been writing about craft beer for 10 years, so I'm very familiar with all of these brands and have tasted them a number of times over the years, and more recently talked to some brewers about some beers that had a particularly good reputation that I had not tried yet. So that's where the reviews in the book come from.

BSL: How many beers are actually noted in the book?
AC: There are about 350 beers that are covered and profiled in the book.
BSL: From how many breweries?
AC: That is a good question. I don't actually know the full answer to that. But I would guess the number is somewhere around 200. There are beers from almost every single state. I think there's one or two states that might not be listed. We tried to get a good cross-section of everything across the country.

BSL: The question then becomes, where in the United States is there no beer?
AC: There are certain states that have taken longer than others to come along. There are some southern states for which craft brewing is still not particularly well represented. There are some states like South and North Dakota that are fairly limited. North Dakota might be another state that doesn't have an entry. They frankly just don't have a lot of brewing going on there. Certainly there are going to be some places that are underrepresented ...

BSL: As far as the United States goes, are we the global stage for beer nowadays?
AC: Yeah, I think that really has become the case. The US right now is really quite a leader in brewing in a way it really hasn't been perhaps ever in its history. Right now, some of the most exciting things happening in the world of beer are indeed happening here in the United States. We have probably the widest breadth of styles and different kinds of beer of every conceivable style, including many that have never existed before, and have some world-class brewers who really are on par with some of the greatest brewers that the classic brewing nations have to offer.

BSL: Craft beer drinkers like to seek holy grails. They like beers that are sort of touchstones; they like to go to them. So do you envision this book as sort of a travel companion?
AC: I think it can be. But in this day and age I don't know that people have to particularly travel too far in a lot of parts of the country for great beer. Great beer seems to be more and more coming to them.

BSL: Beer is a way of traveling to places without actually having to go to them. Certain styles represent certain geographic regions of the country and the world. That's more true now than ever, right?
AC: I think so. Beer and brewing is really about place. While I think it can be done, I don't think sort of armchair drinking is the way to go. As brewers start to move around the country with their distribution into new markets, certainly the book can work as a guide for individuals who want to learn more about particular styles or particular breweries. But I also recommend that people get out and visit these breweries as well because the beer tastes best when it's tasted fresh. And I also don't think beer can be fully divorced from the surroundings in which it comes from.

BSL: Doesn't it say something about beer's place now at the table that you're defying convention, so to speak, by explaining beer to people, the complexity, parsing the flavors? Because the notion that beer is bubbly, slightly bitter and supposed to be yellow (in color) ... That's still ingrained in a lot of people's viewpoint.
AC: Well, the big brewers spent a lot of money over decades drilling into people's minds that beer was not about flavor, was not about the differences in the products themselves, and they sort of became these very much interchangeable widgets. If you were at a bar and a particular beer kicked, and the pub owner didn't have any more of that particular brand, he wouldn't bother to change the (tap) handle. They would just throw on whatever else they had and nobody was the wiser. Nowadays, you really can't do that. People are getting around to trying all these different beers and beginning to realize flavor is where it's at. I think it's time we start talking about (it) in that way, even though for a good portion of the population this is going to be something new to them. So I think the book tries to approach this, not just from a beer geek perspective – though I think there's plenty in the book to satisfy that audience as well – but also just to introduce and try to broaden the audience for craft beer.

BSL: Do you think Budweiser is a dying brand?
AC: There's always going to be a place for the macro brands. They obviously have an economy of scale; they are humongous producers, so they have a lot of clout in the distribution system and obviously in marketing, so I think they'll be around for a long time. I don't think we're going to see them go away. But I think brands such as Budweiser – it's having its own trouble ... been on decline for the better part of a decade. You know there's been the new campaign recently that they're going to try to give away Budweiser free on a particular day. You know that is a tough gig for the folks at Anheuser-Busch InBev. But with that said, light beer continues to sell particularly well, so I think those light beer brands are going to be around for a long time. (But) even the big breweries realize, that while they may not be losing a whole ton of market share to craft beer, they are losing dollars to craft beer, and they're beginning to play a lot more, much more, in the craft beer market, and I expect we're going to see a lot more of that in the years to come.

BSL: You profile two New Jersey beers in the book, Flying Fish Dubbel and High Point's Ramstein Classic. With Ramstein Classic, you refer to dunkelweizen as a little understood category. Why do you think dunkelweizen is that way?
AC: I think German styles overall tend to be a little bit misunderstood, and dunkelweizens in particular. They mix two styles that aren't really that well understood by consumers. With the advent of Blue Moon by Coors, they're beginning to understand sort of cloudy, yeastier beer, such as Belgian-style wit beer, and German-style hefeweizen a little bit more. But dunkel is something they never really understand, so when you mash these two together ... I would say even in Germany when I travel there, this is not a style necessarily particularly well understood. I think it's one of those ones where you mix some sort of caramel malt flavors with some toasted flavors, with some unusual banana and clove notes, it's kind of an odd drinking experience. But I think it's one that's pretty wonderful and pretty interesting across the board. But I think the public generally doesn't quite know what to do with these beers sometimes.

BSL: With extreme beers, the super-hopped and higher alcohol, do you think they are starting to play themselves out, are people coming back around to something that's a reliable beer, one they can always have in their glass and be comfortable with?
AC: I think that has played itself out to some extent. As to how far, it's sort of hard to say. I think that people are beginning to come back around a little bit to wanting a flavor experience they can revisit with some frequency. A lot of the times, these big beers, as you noted earlier, tend to be sort of holy grail beers where people seek them out and move on to the next conquest. It was a very interesting experiment. I'm glad that we went through it and got to experience it. But nowadays, I think, people are hopefully coming back a little bit more to their senses and wanting some more everyday, drinkable, approachable beers. Whether that's with lagers or session beer or ones with simpler numbers of ingredients, I think it's hard to say. As I said in the book, just because your beer is simpler in ingredients doesn't mean that it doesn't have complexity and character in its own right. Some brewers can do fantastic things with a single hop variety, or one or two malt varieties, as opposed to having to always put in 18 different kinds of hops, eight different kinds of malts and fermented in barrels with four yeast strains. Sometimes simple is better, and it certainly can be as characterful as some of the crazy complex offerings we've enjoyed over the last few years.

Well, almost all about bock

Quick correction: No maibock at today's Ramstein open house. Look for maibock at the April 11 open house.

Maibock was on the marquee back when the planning was coming together in the late fall. But it had to be pushed to the April date.

There still will be the eisbock, the star of today's open house kickoff. And there will be Double Plantinum Blonde and the wheat doppelbock. And of course Ramstein Classic Wheat and Amber Lager.

And we're blogging from High Point at this very moment. Hope to see you.

Praise be cold

Here’s a reason to champion a tumble in temperature: eisbock.

And there’s only one reason to bring that up: High Point Brewing’s highly anticipated (draft only) eisbock is in the pipeline.

We spoke to Greg Zaccardi just before Christmas about morphing some Ramstein Winter Wheat Doppelbock into eis. Greg said that a batch of the doppelbock (9% ABV) was finishing out so it could be kegged off, then sent to the big chill to turn the available H2O into an ice core, off which the brewers will draw the malty, now alcohol-richer eisbock. (The most recent incarnation clocked in at 12% ABV; that beer was a surprise treat back in August and quickly pounced on at a brewery open house).

How soon a 2009 Ramstein eisbock happens depends on Mother Nature providing a reliable arctic blast, the kind that turns a lake or pond into a hockey rink. Seems like the weather’s trending toward the sustained below-30 degrees air temperature that’s needed for the conversion. So for now, it’s a waiting game.

But if you want a date to bank on, the folks at High Point expect the eisbock to be available by the second Saturday in March (the 14th). That’s when brewery open houses resume following the winter hiatus. In fact, you can pretty much expect High Point to bock your socks off that day, since their maibock is scheduled to debut then, too.

Here’s another heads-up: Since a portion (about 25 percent) of each keg’s 15 gallons must be sacrificed (as in turned to a discarded slush) to create the eisbock, the supply is obviously tighter than other High Point brews. And the beer has developed a quite an interest among High Point’s draft accounts. What all this means, as fans of this beer well know, is that if you’re not fortunate enough to have Ramstein eisbock on tap at your local bar, then you and your growler should make plans to line up at that first open house of 2009.

Meanwhile, High Point’s Blazing Amber, a draft only Vienna lager, could be under glass this year. Greg’s giving serious consideration to broadening High Point’s bottled lineup with the amber. Stay tuned.

The beer’s name is a nod to the spectacular 1957 inferno at Pequanoc Rubber Mill, a blaze that was visible 100 miles away and drew an offer of help from the NYFD.

Winter on their minds

Say you have some left over beer and you don’t even want to think about it going to waste … what do you do?

You invite some friends over to help you make good cheer of it, right?

That’s what High Point Brewing (Butler) did with a leftover keg of their 2007 Ramstein Winter Wheat, a doppelbock that has a quite a fan base and has earned a measure of critical acclaim.

The open house on Saturday drew a crowd of about 100 or so beerheads armed with their growlers to the brewery, where they snapped up the doppelbock faster than you can say ice bock (or more aptly, eisbock), which is what it became after the brewery staff froze it, drew off the ice, and split it into sixtels, adding another dimension to a beer that's great to start with.

Clocking in around 12% ABV (the strongest offering from the brewery's lineup), the winter wheat/eisbock was definitely rich, deep, dark and inviting – even in the dog days of August, when you'd wonder if it was going to seem like the beer equivalent of a parka in summer.

But it was a really tasty offseason headliner, a pleasant surprise to the loyal Ramsteiners, accompanied, of course, by Ramstein's Classic Blonde and a pilsner and golden lager (which was our take-home beer; the bock ran out before we could think about getting a growler filled. Alas.)

If you missed the winter wheat, be patient. It’s the brewery’s November-release seasonal. It’ll be back around (and maybe the eis, too).

Meanwhile, we got an early taste of the 2008 Ramstein Oktoberfest ...

It’s still a little young and yeasty, with some hop presence that will fade and take its proper place behind the malt flavors by the time it’s ready for September release.

Speaking of debuts, circle Sept. 13 on your calendar. That’s when the brewery kicks off Oktoberfest with an oak barrel tapping.

Bring your growlers that day, too.

FOOTNOTE:
High Point will be pouring at the Stoudt’s Microfest Aug. 23 in Adamstown, Pa.