All posts by Sean Cooke

Sean is a Certified Cicerone® and restaurant consultant with the Better Beer Society. He has an expansive knowledge of beer styles, history, and pairings and advocates for support of local craft brewers. Follow Sean on twitter: @TCBeerDude for no reason at all!
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A Salute to Four Firkins

The news of the closing of the Four Firkins stores in St. Louis Park and Oakdale has come as saddening logonews to craft beer lovers in the Twin Cities. The store served for eight years as a destination for craft beer lovers to make a pilgrimage to find beers that may have otherwise been unavailable at local liquor stores. Friday will be the last day of operation for the St. Louis Park store and the Oakdale store has already closed.

Owner and founder Jason Alvey cites many factors into the sudden closure. Many liquor stores have popped up in the area around the original store. Alvey claims the “nail in the coffin” was the recent construction on highway 100, which made access to the St. Louis Park store very inconvenient. Four Firkins in the Oakdale/Woodbury proved to be successful and popular, but is closing as well.

One, and potentially the biggest factor is a bittersweet realization of the progress of the craft beer scene within Minnesota. Eight years ago, there was no craft beer store, no “build-your-own-6-pack” shelves, and no craft beer aisle. Eight years ago, there were 17 breweries in the state (compared to over 100 currently). The Four Firkins helped to create a marketplace for new breweries to get into the hands of beer enthusiasts.

Ace Spirits
Ace Spirits opened in 2013 and has a huge bottle selection

Fortunately for the Twin Cities beer drinkers, it worked. Often, however, a pioneer is the one who ends up making sacrifices for their cause. The store has done such a successful job of creating their own niche that other retail liquor stores have created their own mini versions. It’s rare to come across a liquor store at this point that does not have a craft beer selection larger than their domestics or does not have a selection of individually-sold bottles. This convenience of availability of craft beer has taken over as the preferred method of shopping for many.

“Part of the reason that the Four Firkins [is closing] is that brands that were once carried almost exclusively by them can now be found in almost any liquor store. Even the rare whales that were once reserved as rewards for loyalty and sales of breweries main-line brands are now routinely given instead to big box stores who sell them at deeply discounted prices. What the Four Firkins offers today’s market isn’t access to more brands, but knowledge, service, freshness, and respect for the product. If consumers care more about price than service, then a place like the Firkins can’t compete.”                                              -Michael Agnew, A Perfect Pint

Again, it is a bittersweet realization that our growing demand for quality beverages has created this situation, but we must thank the tiresome, pioneering efforts of Jason Alvey and the crew at Four Firkins for being the tip of the sword for building the beer scene that we have come to grow and love. Cheers and best wishes!

Follow me on twitter @TCBeerDude

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Making Your Own Bitters at Home

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Sparkling Rum Cocktail featured at Eat Street Social

There’s no question that in this new renaissance age of craft beer and craft cocktails there is an unyielding desire to do everything yourself…at least once. I decided that I would try my hand at making bitters. Bitters are to cocktails as spices are to cooking. They may be very minimal as far as the amount used by volume, but their impact is profound.

With food, you can take a simple dish like Chicken Fettucine Alfredo and change the flavor completely by adding a few shakes of Cajun seasoning. You’ve essentially made a brand-new dish using the same components just by adding seasoning.

Bitters can do the same. Lately, my cocktail of choice has been a whiskey sour with egg white and a ginger syrup. I always throw a few dashes of bitters into the cocktail and different bitters have yielded wildly-different results. I’ve used Angostura, Bittercube Cherry Bark, and Bittercube Blackstrap and each has given me a new experience.

As a bartender and homebrewer, I was inspired and decided to try my hand at making my own, so like any reasonable person would do — I Googled it!

The process is fairly simple — simply steep an ingredient in high-proof alcohol and wait a while. One site recommended creating individual extracts from each ingredients called “tinctures” and then blending them together to create recipes. Then once you’ve gotten used to the process, you can begin creating the bitters in one big batch with everything together. I figured that sounded pretty reasonable, so that’s what I did.

Before I get into it, remember to follow me on Twitter: @TCBeerDude

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Step 1: Pick Your Ingredients

Go Wild! This is your chance to really experiment with very little risk. You might include some bittering agents such as Cherry Bark or Gentian root (available online). I didn’t think those were entirely necessary with the use of the dark rum as a base, but neutral spirits might need it. I recommend lots of earthy and flavorful spices, citrus peel, dried fruit, herbs, and nuts. Here are some examples:

Bittering Agents: Cherry Bark, Gentian Root0310151823sm

Citrus: Orange, Lemon, or Grapefruit Peel

Spices: Cardamon, Clove, Fennel Seed, Peppercorns, Aniseed, Coriander, All Spice Berry, Caraway

Flowers/Misc: Ginger Root, Lemongrass, Hops, Hibiscus, Lavender

Nuts: Toasted Almonds, Toasted Walnuts0310151751sm

For dried spices like peppercorns, coriander, or all spice berries, crack them open by pressing on them with the side of a knife. I peeled the skin off the ginger root first and then shaved the raw ginger into strips using a peeler e for optimal surface area through which to extract the most flavor.

Step 2: Measure Into Jars

Measure out each ingredient into mason jars while 0310151748smkeeping track of the amount of the ingredients by weight.  The actual amount doesn’t matter all that much, but will be useful later for developing recipes for the blends. You should put just enough liquor to cover the ingredients and cram as much of the ingredients into the liquor as possible. On my first run, each tincture tasted great individually, but the flavors weren’t strong enough when blended, so make sure to get a lot of your ingredients in there.

Add your liquor. I used Bacardi 151 for the sake of consistency. I know that 151 is always available at almost any liquor store. The rum itself will add some flavor and I’m okay with that. You can use any alcohol above 50% liquor (100 proof). Alcohol is a solvent, so it extracts and absorbs flavors from your ingredients. For a cleaner flavor, use a clear liquor instead of brown liquors.

Be sure to write down the amount of liquor you put into each jar as well. That will help to make the ratios correct when we do blends later. Label your jars, seal them and then wait.

Step 3: Wait 2 Weeks0310151927sm

Some sites recommended checking each ingredient every day to see when it had finished. Knowing that I was going to be making blends of these ingredients, I wanted to see how they would perform after all hanging out for the same duration. They all did fine hanging out for 2 weeks. Give them a shake every couple of days as well just to be sure to get maximum yield of flavors.

 Step 4: Strain0320151136a

After 7 days, strain your bitters, clean out the jars, and fill hem back up into their properly-labeled jars. For the dried fruit or any other ingredients that may have absorbed the rum, use a spatula to squeeze out as much liquid as you can. At this point, you can taste your bitters. The best way is to put a drop on the back of your hand and then lick that off. This should allow for the high alcohol to dissipate and let the ingredients shine through. If you don’t want to waste the ingredients, save the herbs to make a bread. The herbs should still have significant flavor and are now infused with rum.

Step 5: Develop Your Recipes

This is the fun part where you get to taste and experiment with your final product. To come up with a recipe, you’re going to be mixing drops of these into an 8oz glass of water. Add drops and keep track of how much you’ve used. Once you have a good mix of flavors, you will be able to create a larger batch using the ratios you come up with.

That’s It!

Experiment and have fun. Bitters usually use a lot of different ingredients, so experiment all across the board. You can also use infused syrups to sweeten the mixture if you like your bitters to add some sweetness too. You only need an eyedropper or two in a cocktail, so these bitters should last you a good, long while.

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Why Do We Drink Beer And What Is It Worth?

Beer is one of the oldest beverages known to man. Many believe that beer changed early humans from nomad hunter/gatherers to farmers, thus giving birth to civilization as we know it. The fermented malt beverage has taken many forms and evolved wildly over the centuries, but has been a cornerstone in many countries and cultures.

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Beer is used for any situation. When you’re having a great day, you throw your pint into the air proclaiming your joy and sharing it with the world. On a bad day, you drown your sorrows in a pint while trying to forget life’s trouble. We use beer for currency and for repaying favors. Most importantly, we use beer as an excuse to meet and catch up with old friends, while potentially meeting new ones.

Before we go further into it, remember to follow me on Twitter @TCBeerDude

Now I’m no anthropologist or historian, but I am wildly introspective and like to share what I discover. The reason I bring any of this up is that I recently purchased and drank a bottle of beer that cost me $56. To 99% of the world, that sounds completely insane. To the other 1%, that only sounds slightly insane. But why?

Firstly, $56 for a bottle of wine is certainly pricey, but not in any way unheard of. That’s $14 by the glass, which is a reasonably-priced wine at most upscale restaurants. For some reason, wine has become a symbol of artistry, and aristocracy whereas beer has become the drink of the working class.bzart

The beer itself was a gueuze, a lesser-known style of beer from Belgium that is a blend of two to three lambic beers of varying ages between 1 and 3 years. The lambic style is very  hard to create and many lambics come specifically from breweries that make only lambic beers because of the difficulty with cross-contamination. Lambics ferment spontaneously from wild yeasts found in the cellars and buried in the barrels of these breweries, so making a beer without it usually requires separate equipment and holding vessels. It’s important to note that this style is very effervescent and has many properties like champagne, so to compare beer to wine, this would be a nice champagne for a special occasion. That helps to make that price tag sound a little more reasonable.

This particular beer was called Bzart from Oud Beersel Brewery in Beersel, Belgium. I picked one up from Elevated Beer Wine and Spirits in Minneapolis after talking with the owners there. None of us had tried the beer yet, so my curiosity overcame my budget. I popped the beer the following week as a bbq was winding down at a friend’s house.

As expected, the beer was good. Going into it, I compare it to Timmerman’s Oude Gueuze, which I enjoy quite frequently as one of my go-to celebratory beers that you can usually find at less than half the price of Bzart. I knew full well that Bzart was not going to be twice as good because the price was double, but I did have a feeling that it would be better. And it was.

What is a Beer Worth?

The money you spend on beer definitely has a diminishing return on investment. From $16 a 30-pack to $16 for a 12-pack, the quality of beer improves dramatically. From there, you move into bombers anywhere from $8 to $16 and you will usually find some really nice beer. From there, you get into the rare imports and super-small batch beers. All the while, the quality goes up, but with diminishing returns per dollar increase.

It also takes on a form of art. The purpose of art may be utility at it’s core, but as soon as utility is accomplished, tons more work goes into aesthetic. Sure, I could get drunk off cheap vodka, but that no longer has become the point. I have a sufficient beverage, but now you focus on the flavor, aroma and texture. These beers are about the story and the care it took to create such a delicate blending of flavors while using a yeast that cannot be tamed. It’s pure craftsmanship.

To determine what you should spend on beer is to determine at what point the diminishing returns are no longer worth it to you. Some are content with the $16 30-packs. Others want the 22oz bombers that cost the same. It depends on why you want that drink.

So why do we drink beer?

At the barbecue, I spent a while talking about this idea and it was interesting to hear other people’s opinions. Part of the reason for buying such a bottle was that beer knowledge is my job and my life. It literally pays my bills and I need to experience all that the world of beer has to offer in order to do my job properly — Yeah, my life is awful! 🙂

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Again, I’m no anthropologist, but I do spend my fair share at the pub. We in Minnesota are a food and drink culture. We make plans around lunch, happy hour, dinner, and after-dinner drinks. When faced with the question of a venue for a reunion with long-lost friends or just an excuse to better know our colleagues, we turn first to the bars and restaurants to provide us with a medium and social lubricant that gives us common ground upon which to build an experience.

Beer was the first social media.

I bought and shared a $56 bottle of beer not for the beer itself, but for the opportunity to share the experience and opportunity to have that discussion with close friends. To me, drinking a beer is not the goal, but rather the method for sharing experiences and meeting like-minded individuals.

It can also be a psychological symbol that your time is now stress-free and not necessarily because you’re with others. You can unwind and have a beer and let the social hour begin or sit quietly at home with a bottle of beer with confidence that your day is done and you deserve that time to relax. For me, it is a time to stop and smell the roses — an indefinite stopwatch that lasts for 12 or 22 ounces and reminds me to enjoy the time that I have.

 

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Certified Cicerone Exam – The Road Becoming a Beer Sommelier

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It’s late on a Saturday night and you wander into a neighborhood bar with two of your friends. It’s a quaint little room dimly lit by overhead lights and small candles at each table. Your host escorts you to a table, you can’t hear her last words over the music, but her gesture towards the open chairs will suffice. She places the drink and food menus on the table in front of you before informing you that someone will be right with you.

Moments later, to your table arrives a server, clad in a black green flash palate wreckerdress shirt, that proceeds to introduce himself while serving up cocktail napkins in front of each of you. You haven’t touched the drink menus yet, so you ask him for his opinion. This server actually the bar’s beer expert, who is highly trained to help you make your selection of beer and guide you through the process while providing you with information both about the style of beer and the brewery it comes from. He asks you about your taste preferences, offers samples that may or may not be what you’re used to and is just as pleased as you are to settle on a choice that’s perfect for the occasion and a perfect pairing to your meals. This is the job of a Certified Cicerone®.

My biggest goal over the last few years was to achieve certification at this level and I finally have. As of October 31, 2014, I am a Certified Cicerone®. This level of certification has opened a lot of doors for me and now I want to share that experience with you. The next exam in Minnesota will be in July, so if there is someone who would like guidance preparing for this test or the Certified Beer Server exam, please feel free to contact me. I would love to help. Contact me @TCBeerDude or seanmcooke@gmail.com

I would also like to congratulate the other new Certified Cicerones® in MN that took the test with me in October. I know that the Four Firkins had two staff members and JJ Taylor had one team member become certified, so congrats to them and any others I missed.

Please note that the titles “Certified Cicerone®” and “Master Cicerone®” are protected certification trademarks of the Cicerone Certification Program.

Certified Cicerone®

For anyone working in a brewery or craft beer bar, Sen Yai Sen Lek - Thai Rice & Noodles“Cicerone®” is a household term. The word comes from European museums, be they art or historical, where one may guide you through your tour and answer your questions, but may not give you the same rehearsed speech that the last guests received. They are there to customize your experience while providing any supplementary knowledge. I personally love this analogy. I would personally like to see more of a “tour guide” approach to your entire experience at a bar.

The Cicerone Certification Program out of Chicago has three levels of certification. Certified Beer Server is the first level, which many bartenders, servers and other jobs in the beer world receive their certification. Certified Cicerone® is the second level, which I equate to a Masters Degree in beer. There are roughly 30 at this level in the Twin Cities. Finally, the third level, Master Cicerone®, is analogous to an encyclopedia of beer knowledge. There are only 9 Master Cicerones in the United States and Canada.

If you want to go for the Certified Cicerone®, you should know that it is very difficult even for people who work in the best craft beer places in the industry. You will have to dedicate serious amounts of time even outside of work in order to get up to speed. If you have never worked in the industry, specifically with craft beer, this is going to be extremely difficult for you. The program is designed for bartenders, managers, servers, and other people on the service side of beer.

Preparation

The first rule of Certified Cicerone® training – don’t train alone. The second rule of Certified Cicerone® training is DON’T TRAIN ALONE!!! When I decided to set out to train for this exam, I got together a small group of friends who wanted to learn more about beer for different reasons. At the time, I managed the tap list at Zeke’s Unchained Animal with 20 local breweries on tap, each different styles of beer. I couldn’t have done it without a studying partner as well versed and driven as I was. My good friend, Gill, who is my homebrewing partner and manages the taps at Longfellow Grill, had a similar level of knowledge and we learned a lot together.

I would make sure that you are studying with a Certified Cicerone® or someone who has taken the exam. Their experience will allow you to know exactly how prepared you need to be compared to your current knowledge base. The Cicerone website offers a practice exam from 2008, the format and difficulty of which is very similar to the exam I took in July. If you feel like you can do the 2008 test and provide an educated answer to every question, then you are doing well, but I wouldn’t say that you are ready quite yet. It’s a good base. You should make flash cards of the most common beer styles and have 3 commercial examples of each style. That will help immensely.

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The main part of our studying was doing tastings. We had a rotating cast of bartenders, servers, beer sales reps, and brewers that participated in our study sessions and provided a nice variety of palates to have a discussion on the beers and their flavors. We spent 10 weeks going through beers by type and region and describing them. If you want to do this, I would strongly suggest reading my article on Active Tasting first and encouraging more detailed tasting discussions among a small group.

Also, you should brew. You should brew with someone who knows what they’re doing if you aren’t experienced. Much to my benefit, Gill had been homebrewing for over a year when we first met and was able to explain some of the more intricate processes of brewing that I could not have understood without participating. And no, brewery tours will not suffice. You need to do it yourself. Make sure that you are developing recipes using all-grain and not just copying recipes online so that you get used to choosing the different hops and grain that are available. It is very likely that you will have to come up with a recipe for a specific beer style on your Certified Cicerone® Exam.

After you are familiar with all the beer styles, you need to have long, in-depth conversations about beer pairings with someone who knows what they’re doing. For me, a good friend, Nate Walters, had taken the exam previously and knew what the Cicerone program was looking for as far as pairings and it was much more in depth than I had originally planned. I also have an article on Food & Beer Pairings if you need a starting point for your conversations. Make it into a game and see what you all can come up with while sitting around a bar table.

Lastly, you should do at least 2 off-flavor seminars at different times with different groups of people. This was incredibly important for me when I re-took the tasting exam.

The Exam

Holy crap! This is a tough exam. I’ve done a lot of really difficult things in my lifetime and this may have been the toughest 4 hours of my life. I originally took the full exam in July, taking a week off work to take the exam in Chicago. It requires full attention and concentration, so make sure not to have any major life events going on at the time. The written exam is not as intimidating as it seems if you’ve done the 2008 practice exam. There is an extensive section on short answer, which you should be able to breeze through without thinking too hard.

There is a section on pairings, which you must keep in mind is objective, but provide the best answer you can. Safe, easy pairings are totally acceptable. Then there is an essay where you pick a beer that pairs with a dish they describe. You brick-ovenshould make note of all the flavors in that dish, interpreting it how you see fit and describe all the flavors of your beer style and how they pair. For example, Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo has a lot of cream flavor, but you should make note of sweetness from the carmelization from the  grill marks on the chicken. You can modify the dish, saying that it comes with a grilled piece of bread, lending toasty and nutty flavors or add a pinch of tomato and basil for a garnish, which may allow you to further explain how your choice of beers would work with those flavors as well. That you can play around and make the dish and the pairing your own, putting yourself more in the figurative driver’s seat than you could otherwise.

This sounds obvious, but read the directions carefully and make sure you cover all your bases on the essay questions. Many times, the essays have multiple questions in them and it is easy to gloss over a few easy points.  The essays are your time to shine, so throw in any knowledge you have. The most important thing to note on the written exam is that most of us haven’t written anything extensive using pen and paper in a long time.  It’s physically draining.

The Tasting Exam

Never in my life have I been more intimidated than I was walking into the room above the Chicago bar, where we did our exam in July. Waiting outside, I was with a group of complete strangers that had a ton of things in common and we became best of friends for the half hour in between the two parts of the exam. We were talking about the essays, our jobs, and our favorite beers. Then we were called into the room for the tasting exam. Everyone went silent. On each table sat 13 small, clear plastic cups, many with the same light gold hue. On them, small stickers with the letters ‘A’ through ‘L.’ We all knew this was coming, yet there was a palpable feeling of intimidation lingering in the air.

This section is extremely difficult and requires a very good palate. There’s a little bit of luck from time to time depending on the beers chosen to represent each style. For example, Salvator Doppelbock has a lot of fruity esters that can easily confused for a Dubbel. My best advice on the tasting…train your nose HARDCORE!!!!  If you develop your ability to smell the differences in beer, you can save your palate from getting over-worked. On my tasting re-take, I didn’t try 3 of the beers until after I was done because I knew what they were by smell and did not want to tax my palate any more than I had to. Also, be sure to eat something very heavy that morning. You do not want the alcohol to affect your ability to taste.

I should also mention the demonstration portion. This is all about the service and maintenance side of things. You will be asked to demonstrate your knowledge on camera. This could be hooking up a keg, pouring a perfect beer, cleaning a faucet, how to tell if a glass is beer-clean, or something along those lines. Don’t fret too much about it, but know that it’s there and, again, read the directions and make sure you cover all the questions.

Grading

So, you finish the exam. The proctor will then tell you that you will get your results back in 4-6 weeks. After torturing yourself for 4 1/2 hours, 4-6 weeks feels like an eternity. The first 4 or 5 days will drive you crazy as you think back on the questions you know you missed or the details you should have included. After about 5 days, it will slowly fade into memory and you won’t worry so much. You’ll get an email a few weeks later explaining your scores broken down like this:Untitled-1

The tasting exam is a weighted average of the 12 questions from the tasting, which you must get at least 70% to pass. Then that is factored into the “Beer Flavor & Evaluation” category along with your answers from the written exam. Then the overall score is calculated as a weighted average of the 5 categories. After my first attempt, I passed the tasting portion with exactly 70%, but the overall score was just barely too low (77%), so I chose to re-take the tasting with the hopes of raising the full score a few percent to get me up to that 80% mark. I scored an 86% on the tasting the second time, which brought my overall score up high enough to receive my certification.

My biggest advice would be to make sure you can score very high on the written portion of the exam. If you need to take one portion over, it is much better to have to take the tasting over than the written. Retaking the written means studying styles, history, draft systems, brewing ingredients, etc. Instead, taking the tasting again means you only have to focus on a couple different parts of the exam (off flavors and style guidelines). I can attest from experience, it’s much easier and much less stressful.

Again, if you need any help along your journey to learn more about beer and become certified, I would love to offer you any advice I can and I know that the other Certified Cicerones® in town would say the same. Follow me on twitter @TCBeerDude

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Surly Beer Hall Opens

On May 25th, 2011, Governor Mark Dayton signed into law a change to the three-tier system of Minnesota’s liquor laws to allow breweries to both sell their products on-site yet maintain the right to distribute beer to bars and restaurants. This proposed “Surly Bill” came after the announcement of Surly’s plans to expand into a new facility which was to include a restaurant and beer garden. Three and a half years later, Surly Brewing Company open its doors to the public at the new facility in the Prospect Park neighborhood of Minneapolis.

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The new location, sandwiched in between the two downtowns, is prime location just off of Metro Transit’s new Green Line and minutes away from TCF Bank Stadium and the University campus. Public transit users planning on going opening weekend should visit Surly’s website – Metro Transit is offering free rides to and from the brewery with a pass you can download and print.

It will truly function as a destination for Surly beer lovers both local and national. The brewery looks to offer a full lineup of Surly beers, including some taproom exclusives. You can still get your Furious on draft or any of your other favorites. I personally recommend the new West Coast IPA, Todd the Axe Man. It’s a fantastic single malt and single hop IPA.

The Surly Beer Hall kitchen, led by Chef Jorge Guzman, is offering up a small, but mighty menu featuring a variety of chef-driven, beer-focused food items. “It’s fuckin’ awesome!” says the new Executive Chef describing the excitement to be a part of such a large project.

Chef Jorge comes most recently from Solera, primarily a wine bar with a big focus on pairings. “Beer pairs better with food,” says Guzman, “it’s easier.” The wide variety of beer flavors and styles will allow Guzman more room to be creative with the menu and their pairings. “I’m scared as hell to have a project of this size, but humbled to be involved.”

The chef’s recommendations on pairings for the beer hall menu include the barbecue and Surly Furious or the Surly CynicAle with lighter dishes like the salads.

As for the brewing itself, Surly is over tripling its brewhouse size moving from 30 barrels (60 Kegs) to 100 barrels (200 kegs). The fermentation space is also upgrading 10 fold per unit, so Surly should be able to pump out a whole lot more beer to keep up with demand. At Brooklyn Center, Surly would only able to produce 42,000 barrels a year total. Todd Haug, head of brewing operations, says that the new location will aim to produce 1200 barrels of Surly’s flagship beer Furious every week.

Surly Brewing Co. has certainly taken a strong foothold and has become one of the centers of craft beer identity in Minnesota in the last decade. Now Surly aims at the national market and has begun distribution outside of Minnesota as well.

Follow me on Twitter @TCBeerDude for more news about MN Breweries

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What Makes a Good Craft Beer Bar?

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It makes me very elated to be a part of this rapidly-evolving craft beer scene and even more excited to see the development of beer-focused bars and restaurants offering great food and atmosphere as well. There are a number of things that make a good beer bar and they are no accident. It all begins with proper beer knowledge and a lot of hard work. Managing taps can take a majority of a manager’s time Sunday through Wednesday during inventory and ordering days. Keeping menus updated and staff educated turn the whole ordeal into a full-time job for some. I’ve done it and yes, it is difficult and unending, but highly rewarding when you have customers excited to stop in and talk about what’s new on tap and how they like it. Here’s some of the parts of a successful beer program:

Remember to follow me on twitter: @TCBeerDude

Taps Come First1029141331a

Almost every bar has a mix of tap and bottle beer. A bar’s tap list defines the beverage program to the customer and provides an insight into the personality of the bar manager and the restaurant identity itself. A bar’s first priority should be the tap list, supplemented with a decent bottle section. A bad tap list with a good bottle selection is a sure-fire way to convey that you are not really a beer place.

Variety

The craft beer audience is not one to stick with one favorite beer or beer style. They would much rather seek good beers of all styles with specific attention to seasonal and limited release options. This is a relatively easy concept and most restaurants do a semi-decent job at it. Below, I have outlined a few beer categories to make sure you include in your beer program. There are 8 categories. My advice would be to extrapolate that. If you have 16 taps, then include 2 from each category that are different from each other. 24 taps, include 3 from each category and so on.

  1. Very Light beer — This doesn’t have to be one of the big companies (Miller, Bud, Coors, etc) but for the most part, it will be. Other options may include something like a Surly Hell, Lucid Air or Sam Adams Light

  2. Light Beer — Different from the category above, this represents the beers that someone looking for more flavor without a big, heavy beer would look for. There are lots of options here like Lagunitas Pils, Enki Victoria’s Gold, or Third Street Rise to the Top.

  3. Wheat Beer/Saison — It’s even more important to note that this category is not the same as the light beer category. There are many a customer who seek a specific flavor profile in their beers that are available in styles like a Hefeweizen, Wit or Saison. These beers are usually viewed as summer seasonals, but should be used year-round as they fill a gap in most restaurants’ portfolios throughout the year. Remember that beers need to pair with customers’ food and mood as well as season. Depending on your customers, a White IPA or Trippel may suffice for this category.

  4.  Pale Ale — This is most people’s go-to beer. A nice, easy drinking pale with some spice notes and a little malt backbone that goes with most food or is great by itself. Sierra Nevada Pale, Summit EPA or Indeed Day Tripper will all work nicely

  5. Classic IPA — Okay, here we throw a bone to the majority of craft beer drinkers. This category contains the beers with a lot of hops and a little bit of malt character. This beer and your two light categories are going to be the big sellers. Use beers like Bells Two Hearted, Stone IPA, and Fulton Sweet Child of Vine for this category

  6. Another Hoppy Beer — Yup, you heard me.  Add another. But make this one different. This is where you have something that may be a little more interesting than your mainstream IPA. Here, you can use the White IPA, American Red Ale, Double IPA, etc. Some options include Deschutes Chainbreaker, Bad Weather Windvane, or Big Wood Bad Axe.

  7. Something malty!!!! — This is the category that so often gets overlooked. This is the easy-drinking beer for people with more adventurous palates and I for one usually find this category lacking in a lot of bars and restaurants. This should be a malt-forward beer somewhere between the amber and brown color range. Some possible options here include Killian’s Irish Red, New Belgium Fat Tire, and Flat Earth Ovni.

  8. Liquid Sandwich — Finally, we’ve reached the porter/stout category. You can never take this one off the list. If you don’t have a porter or stout, you risk customers walking out. This is true even on the hottest of summer days. Options here include Guiness, Tall Grass Buffalo Sweat, or Left Hand Milk Stout.

Once you have all of your bases covered for these styles, you can get adventurous and include more fun styles, but make sure you’ve got good options available first.

Familiar vs. Newbeer_craft

There is something very repulsive about a bar that has all of the best-known beers on tap. There is nothing wrong with including some of these beers, but if all you have available is larger breweries, then you are pushing away a large demographic of people looking to be more adventurous. I’m talking about Sam Adams Boston Lager, Stella Artois, Blue Moon, Heineken, Guiness, etc. These are very viable beers and there are a lot of people that would be able to find something that they would drink. The problem is that you haven’t created any sort of unique experience for your customers. Even including a couple beers mixed into that like Lakefront Fixed Gear or Badger Hill Foundation Stout can make your customers stop to take note of that variety and make their experience more memorable than a standard, cookie-cutter tap list you might find at a national chain restaurant.

Staff Training

I was at a bar once with three friends and we were looking to order beers before looking at the food menu. I spotted a beer I hadn’t tried and I asked our server, a middle-aged woman who seemed like an experienced server, what the beer was like. “It’s a beer. It tastes like beer,” she told me. I was floored by her ignorance and the fact that she took no further action to find out what the beer was and help me make my decision.

This is the number one place where craft beer programs fail. The bar features 30 different taps and the staff knows nothing about them. To me it really comes down to one main idea: if you serve it, you should know about it. It’s that simple.

The servers are expected to be able to describe the food, answer general questions about its preparation, help to address allergy issues, and make suggestions based on their own personal taste. It has gone on for too long that we tolerate servers and bartenders not knowing the beer the same way. Just because you don’t make it in house doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to educate your customers. It is a bad hangover from the post-prohibition era before the resurrection of craft beer when all there was to drink was light lagers. Consumers knew the brand of beer that they drank and didn’t ask questions about it. The bartender’s job was easy. Now the customer has questions. The consumers want to know what our craft beers taste like and it is a critical failure in my mind if there is not someone available to answer basic questions about what a restaurant has available. If you serve it, you should know about it.

Restaurant staff should also know the proper glassware and cleaning processes. A 9.5% Belgian Strong Ale should not be served 16 or 20 ounces at a time. If it is, then you should enjoy your extra beer but I wouldn’t count on that establishment as a positive example of a craft beer bar. Also look for the glasses on the shelf to be clean, not cloudy or without any etchings on the insides of the glasses where they have been stacked. Glasses should also not contain any vapor inside of them indicating that they have been stacked before they are dry — it harbors bacteria.

When the beer is poured, make sure there are no places where bubbles seem to be coming from a particular spot on the side of the glass. That indicates dirty glassware. White lacing clinging to the side of the glass after drinking the beer is indicative of a clean glass, but not seeing that lacing does not necessarily mean the glass was dirty.1029142356a

Menus

This one is hard! I’ve seen this done a hundred different ways and each one has its flaws. Firstly, your menus must be updated constantly if you change up your product as often as you should. That’s a no-brainer. The hard part is dividing up your beer menu to help customers find their beer style. At Zeke’s, we featured 30 different styles from 30 different local breweries and listed each one’s style on our menu. We didn’t expect the customers to know what each style was, so I ordered them on the menu from lightest to darkest, trying to keep similar beers together.

One thing that I hate to see on a menu is the use of the word “Lager” as a category. It’s usually used to denote lighter beers, but is misleading and perpetuates the idea that all lagers are light. Even worse is the use of the word “Ale” as a category. Almost every beer on the menu will be an ale, so why bother? That’s even more confusing. Grouping Belgians together seems helpful, but it’s not. Belgian beers have more variety in flavor than any other region’s beer, so to put a Witbier, Belgian IPA, Dubbel and Oud Bruin in the same category causes more problems than it fixes.

The best method for grouping beers that I’ve found actually comes from the Butcher and the Boar’s drink menu. The beers are divided into these categories: Light & Crisp, Fruit & Funk, Hopped & Bitter, Malt & Roast. In my opinion, this is the method that causes the least confusion and least possible overlap between sections if you’re choosing to break up your beer menu into sections.

Belief in the Program

Craft beer is an art. It is a community resurgence in the appreciation of the finer things in life. It represents a cultural shift in priority toward quality of activities our daily routine such as food, music, and drink. If a bar is using a craft beer program to drive sales, but doesn’t believe in the beer that they are selling, it is guaranteed to fail. I’m not saying you have to devote your life to beer, but there are a few tell-tale signs. It comes in the details such as clean glassware, attention to the temperature of the beer, and proper pouring. Pouring a foamy beer that causes half a pint to go down the drain or using draft systems that help make pouring easier for an untrained and apathetic bar staff is a dead giveaway of a company that does not take pride in the details.

There are many people who have fought hard to help beer gain its rightful place in society as a well-respected industry and art form that represents our culture as a neighborhood, state and nation.

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Domestic vs Local? Let’s Reclaim our Lexicon!

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Like most people, I understand words based on their intended definitions. When people twist the meaning a word from the original definition it is bothersome, disingenuous, and confusing for readers. We often see this “definition twisting” happen in the beer world when the word is, “domestic.”

 

do·mes·tic

/dəˈmestik/
adjective
existing or occurring inside a particular country; not foreign or international.
“the current state of US domestic affairs”
synonyms: national, home, internal

Domestic Cascadian Dark Ale?

Most consumers know that “domestic beer” has been used 1029141331aas a sort of euphemism for “macro-industrial american light lager,” for several decades now. But, the term is now even further from what it used to mean. The rise of a craft beer, the drink local movement, and American breweries being swallowed by international brewing conglomerates, make this the right time to straighten out the term “domestic.” Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a clean, light lager. However, light lager doesn’t mean domestic. It is time we reclaim the word. It just isn’t right that a term meaning American-made excludes most American styles and brewers. Domestic can mean “at home” or “within the same country.” I appreciate American-made products, especially our resurging love of beer and our unique American styles like Cream Ale, American Red Ale, and Cascadian Dark Ale. Thus, the same term that we should be using for any beer that is American-Made should not be the opposite of the word “Craft” much less be the opposite of the word “Local.” That just doesn’t make sense.

Domestic vs Local

When someone says “local beer” we automatically associate the term with smaller craft breweries that represent our local culture. When we say, “Domestic Beer” we imagine macro-industrial light lagers that have spent billions of dollars on advertising campaigns that have focused on making their brands synonymous with our country. They want you to think that drinking their macro-industrial lagers makes you more American. One of Budweiser’s many tag lines is “The Great American Lager.” The problem with their tag line is that Budweiser is owned by the AB InBev, a corporation which is headquartered in Brazil and Belgium. The #1 “domestic” brewery is not actually domestic. Sure, the beer is made in America. But, if we look to the auto industry, the fact that Toyota manufactures cars in America doesn’t make it an American car company. Budweiser or Miller making beer in America don’t make them American beer companies.

So, join me and reclaim the word, “domestic.”

Fresh Hops going into Lake Monster's newest creation
Fresh Hops going into Lake Monster’s newest creation

Let it represent our American spirit and our American brewing traditions both old and new. I say any beer made in the US is a domestic beer, not just macro-industrial brews by mega-corporations. Don’t let those companies hide behind the veil of Americana any longer and don’t let another great word in our lexicon get dragged through the mud any longer. Drink domestic. Drink local. Drink craft!

And more importantly — follow me on Twitter @TCBeerDude