Travels with Barley (29 page)

At that moment, I totally understood it.

As noted earlier, homebrewing's signature political moment in America came in 1979, when legislation signed by Jimmy Carter went into effect that finally gave beer brewers the same rights that home winemakers had been accorded after the repeal of Prohibition. The ultimate decision, however, was still left to the states and five states—Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah—still prohibit the making of beer at home.

Before legalization, people homebrewed under a system by which authorities in most states generally looked the other way; a smattering of homebrew shops sold ingredients for making beer but they were constrained by law from providing beer-making instructions to their customers. The result: supplies weren't always readily available and often of dubious quality (corn sugar instead of malt), relegating homebrewing to a fringe, underground hobby indulged in mostly by people whose main interest was making cheap beer. (Even with good ingredients and at today's prices, a pint of high-quality homebrew only costs about 25 cents to make.)

There were exceptions. Fred Eckhardt was brewing out in his native Portland, having discovered a pioneering Canadian company called Wine Art that was attempting to introduce high-quality ingredients and professional methods into homebrewing. Out of Eckhardt's dabbling with Wine Art's ingredients and recipes came his 1969 pioneering tract,
A Treatise on Lager Beer
, which was a primer intended to walk the amateur brewer through the somewhat complicated lagering process. (Lager is much harder to make at home than ale because it requires constant refrigeration.)

In Boulder, Colorado, a guy named Charlie Papazian was also making his mark. In 1976, three years before legalization, he produced a homebrewing guide called
The Joy of Brewing
which included, among other things, recipes for beers called Goat Scrotum Ale and Toad Spit Stout. In 1984, Papazian published a second primer called
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing
, which became the homebrewer's bible, and followed it up with a sequel in 1991,
The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing
, which has sold 750,000 copies. Papazian in 1978 also founded the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) and launched a homebrew magazine called Zymurgy (a term referring to how yeast does the business of fermentation). The homebrewers group is now part of a large enterprise called the Association of Brewers, which has hewed to its homebrewing roots while branching out into the promotion of craft breweries.

These days, some two million Americans consider themselves occasional brewers and 250,000 count themselves as ardent, active hobbyists. They are served by about 300 homebrew clubs like the Foam Rangers (and perhaps another 500 less formal local groups). Some 500 storefront homebrew shops sell supplies, and a less calculable number of enterprises peddle homebrewing equipment and ingredients via mail order or the Internet. The AHA estimates homebrewing is probably a $25 million annual business in America today.

Competitions like the Dixie Cup have been part of the scene since 1980 and these days they are judged by the standards of a nonprofit group called the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP), which defines beer styles and lays out parameters—things such as color, nose, carbonation, malt, and hops profile—that the ideal example of the style should have. (Not unlike, actually, a dog show.) The BJCP, founded in 1985 under the auspices of the AHA but now independent, also certifies homebrew contest judges through an education and testing program. Contests like the Dixie Cup, if they hope to send winners on to national competitions like the Master Championship of Amateur Brewing or the AHA's own National Homebrew Competition, must follow BJCP beer style guidelines; this requires rounding up enough BJCP-certified judges (all of them volunteers) to make sure that at least one BJCP-rated judge sits on the two- to three-person panels that preside over each beer category.

For an outfit like the Rangers, which has forty-two style categories, this is a prodigious organizational effort, given that the judging exams are actually exacting and require far more than just a passing knowledge of things like yeast and fermentation. (They aren't exactly a bar exam but they are far more formidable than a driver's license test.) On the other hand, Fred Eckhardt told me, “Homebrewers are the most organized people I know. You could turn the government of the country over to homebrewers and they'd do a much better job of things than the government is doing now.” At any rate, contest mania, with some 140 competitions all across the U.S., is an entrenched part of the homebrew landscape today. The AHA's National Homebrew Competition in June 2003 drew thousands of entries and more than 3,300 individual beers were advanced to a final round.

As for getting the full Dixie Cup experience, it was Bev Blackwood, who, along with Scott Birdwell, a founding Ranger and owner of DeFalco's Home Wine and Beer Supplies, where the club holds its monthly meetings, who told me that I needed to go judge some beer. When I told Birdwell, the nation's first-ever master BJCP-certified judge, that I knew nothing about beer judging he said it didn't matter: in the preliminary rounds, contests made room for novice judges interested in learning the fine art of beer scoring from the veterans. This is how the system produced future judges. My score would still count toward advancing one or two of the judged beers to the final round of competition but I would be flanked by one or two judges who knew what they were doing and could rein me in if I got carried away.

Thus it was, on the first day of the two-day Cup, that I found myself being admonished to be on the lookout for
diacetyls
as I sat in one of those nondescript, bunkerlike hotel conference rooms with a bucket full of numbered beers in front of me. When I first got the diacetyl warning I admit I briefly scanned the ceiling above me, the word having sounded somewhat close to
pterodactyl
. But, duh, my immersion in Yeast World jogged my memory and I vaguely recognized it as a Beer Geek term that described some yeasty ester that certain beers threw off.

Luckily, I was in the company of John Donaldson, a geophysicist who worked on oil field seismic projects and was a card-carrying member of the KGB. In this case, it stood for Kuykendahl Gran Brewers, another Texas homebrew club and rival to the Rangers. He had come to the Cup as both an entrant and a judge—perfectly allowable so long as you don't judge in the same style in which your beer is entered. Birdwell had steered me to Donaldson because he was presiding over a common and relatively easy-to-judge style—Bohemian Pilsner, which careful readers may recall was the original clear lager perfected in the early 184Os. Pilsner Urquell is a popular commercial rendition of the style and Donaldson assumed I'd at least sampled it at some point. “That would give you a reference,” he told me.

In fact, I'd drunk a fair number of Pilsner Urquells in my beerconsuming career but I doubted that, if one were shoved at me in an unmarked bottle at this very moment, I'd be able to name it or necessarily declare it a Bohemian Pilsner as opposed to, say, a northern German Pilsner, which I'd noticed was another style in the contest. Northern German Pilsner was basically a fraternal twin of Bohemian Pilsner but slightly drier, Donaldson explained, and was represented by beers such as Bitburger or Holsten PiIs. (Holsten I'd tried; Bitburger I couldn't be sure of.)

As to the matter of diacetyl, Donaldson said it was a buttery, even butterscotch flavor that was a by-product of certain yeasts; levels were determined by brewing temperature. Higher temperatures often gave off higher diacetyls, which wasn't usually a good thing. Some brewers, to hold down diacetyl, throw a “diacetyl rest” into their brewing cycle, Donaldson explained this to me in great detail. I nodded as though I understood every word. I understood hardly any of it.

No matter: the real point was that in the beer we were judging, “moderate diacetyl” was acceptable and, moreover the beer should be “rich with a complex malt and a spicy, floral
Saaz
hop bouquet.” As for
Saaz
hops, they were considered to be the world's finest finishing hops; they grew in America these days but the best of them still came from the Bohemia region of the Czech Republic.

Now, all we had to do was judge the five beers in our flight. Scoring was on a scale from 1 to 50. Donaldson said he'd never given a 50, since “to me, 50 is a Utopian idea. There will be a beer like that when we all get to heaven.” He considered a score of 40 to be an exceptional beer; on the other hand, he almost never gave a score lower than a 13, “unless the beer's a total stinker.” We were expected to back up our scores with pithy written comments defending them. The only tricky thing is that judges are expected to come within a 7 point range of each other; if they don't on the first go-round, the beer in question has to be the subject of instant mediation. “If you give it a 45 and I give it a 14, we'll have to go back and work on it,” Donaldson said. “I'll have to come up some and you'll have to go down some. You don't want the brewer, who gets the scorecard, saying, ‘What the hell were these freaking idiots thinking?'”

Donaldson was right: being branded a freaking idiot was something I, Novice Beer Judge, wanted to avoid at any cost. I was already starting to sweat.

We were assigned our own steward to pour the beer and he was instructed to pour it in such a way that we got moderate head because the head got judged, too, along with the color and aroma. Donaldson then handed me an official style sheet; it said this particular beer ought to be “light gold to deep copper gold, clear, with a dense creamy white head.”

“So before you put down your first impressions, always give the beer a visual check. And try to pick out some of those aromas, too,” Donaldson admonished me.

As we started to go through the beers, cleansing our palates in between with bites of bread and sips of water, Donaldson told me his route to homebrewing. It was a common story. “Wild obsession, basically,” he said. “My dad brewed but I didn't take it up—back then I didn't even like beer but I realize now that's because my exposure was limited to industrial beers. Then a friend later turned me on to homebrewing and, ah, a light bulb went on. For four or five years I was completely consumed by everything about beer. It wasn't good. I was neglecting my work, my family—everything.”

Donaldson stopped and laughed and said he'd dialed back his beer mania to a saner level. We then lapsed into the quiet of sipping, musing, and judging.

I held my breath as we got through the first beer. He'd given it a 28; I'd given it a 25.1 was secretly elated.

The next beer. I awarded a 27, he gave it a 26. Bingo!

The next beer didn't seem anything like a Bohemian Pilsner to me; it was sweet, almost apple-cidery. I said so and boldly gave it a 15.

Donaldson agreed with me completely, saying “this is more like an apple mead than a Pilsner.” He scored it more generously still but only a 19.

I was rolling!

We got through the remaining two beers with scores in the low 30s, just a point apart.

Along the way, Donaldson offered running commentary like, “This particular beer is not a bad beer but in character it's more like American light lager than a European Pilsner… . This one looks turbulent. My goodness, look at the gas in this beer—it's boiling like the surface of the sun!”

I was relegated to saying prosaic things like “this beer seems flat to me” but at least I was in the scoring ballpark. Maybe I was a Beer Geek in Waiting.

Scott Birdwell came over to see how we were doing and he even tasted our low-scoring cidery beer, which we had pretty much concluded had been mislabeled and belonged in another category. “Hey, a Iambic Pilsner,” Birdwell declared, inventing a new style completely. (Lambics are sour, wild-fermented Belgian Ales.)

“That's nothing,” Birdwell added. “I once tasted a Belgian ale made with LifeSavers. It was a very good and very strange beer.” (Birdwell later told me he could think of one even stranger beer he'd tried: some guy had made a beer using Beano, the antiflatulence remedy, as a way of producing a low-calorie light beer.)

Birdwell asked me if I was up for more judging. Confident, I said, “Sure.”

Which is how I ended up at a judging table with Fred Eckhardt, guru of all homebrew judges, and a Ranger named Sean Lamb. I'd gotten to know Fred a bit by now and liked him a lot. But I wasn't sure I wanted to judge beer with him. I'm a garage-band-level blues guitar player but that doesn't mean I'd want to risk the embarrassment of trying to jam with B.B. King.

Eckhardt, though, made it easy by turning it into a class, but first he offered a short discourse on the value of the homebrewer in the cosmos. “Homebrewers are now the cutting edge of brewing because they are the ones restlessly experimenting,” he said. “I'd be willing to bet that there isn't a style of beer made anywhere in the world that some American brewer hasn't made at home. And they are on the cutting edge of beer invention—one of the last styles to be invented, a beer called Bourbon Bock, was invented by a homebrewer.”

Then we got to the beer. We were judging a flight of nine beers in a style known as British Mild, a subcategory of Brown Ales, which are supposed to be, the style sheet said, “medium to dark brown in color with a malty, hopless aroma and a roasty, nutty flavor that could include esters of licorice, plum, raisin, or chocolate.” Fred explained: “In England this is the equivalent of light beer. It's very low in alcohol—about 2.5 percent. It's a wonderfully aromatic beer and you can drink a lot of it and still find the subway home. Of course, in England, they don't dare call this a light beer. If they did, people would pour it down the drain.”