Bottoms Up

WASHINGTON – The Brewers’ Association beer and food tasting bash continues tonight, the final night. I’m sitting in the brewers’ tent outside the hall minutes before two more interesting salons begin. Gonna’ try and bank\g out some facts.

Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association said the idea for this fantastic weekend came from brewers on their board of directors including Garrett Oliver, Brooklyn Brewing, Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head, and Greg Koch, Stone Brewing. It took 15 months to pull off.

Best thing that happened was hiring Federal Caterers to do the food. The beer pairing items are uniformly excellent and interesting. There are 200 waiters, which explains why they never run out of food. They’re all wearing black jackets, white shirts, both men and women.

TIDBITS…Ran into MorganWolaver, who founded the Wolaver’s organic beer company with his brother, Robert, in 1997. They bought Otter Creek Brewing in Middlebury, VT. in 2002. All their organic beers are made there, but sales are just 30 percent of their total production, Morgan said.

The interesting thing is they’re talking to Vermont organic farmers, trying to make a deal for them to grow organic hops and also organic barley. They already have a deal for an organic farmer to grow organic wheat this year, he said.

It’s starting to happen all over. Larry Bell of Bell Brewing, Kalamazoo, MI., signed a deal last week with a farmer who is going to grow two-row barley for him. (Two row barley, which refers to the number of rows on the grain’s head is the kind of barley mostly used in beer, although some big brewers, no names here, use the more corse, six row instead.) According to the Kalamazoo newspaper, Bell’s investing $400,000 in the project. Read more here.

The cost of both hops and barley have soared in recent months and grain futures indicate still higher prices ahead. This is the bottom line behind $10 a six pack beer.

During one of the salons today, someone in the audience asked Boston Brewing’s Jim Koch (Sam Adams) and Randy Mosher, author of several books on brewing, and an instructor at Seibel Institute of Technology & World Brewing in Chicago about the future for the hop supply.

Mosher’s optimistic. “In farming (and hop growing) there’s a lag time between demand and supply. In the next three years we’re going to be drowning in cheap hops,” he said.

However, Koch was more cautious. “There’s a different element to the picture,” he said. “What Randy said about high alpha (hops used to make beer bitter) is true.” Most of the hops big brewers use are high alpha hops, but craft brewers use a lot of aroma hops, the hops like Simcoe, that provide the aromatic qualities in craft beer, the grapefruit, orange, fruity notes.

Finding those hops is a little trickier, he said. :”The Brewers Association is trying to work with smaller hop growers, trying to get them to plant more acres of the kind of hops we need. So the glut of high alpha hops doesn’t really help us,” Koch said.

He added that the hops Sam Adams uses, Hallertau Middlefrau, are only grown on a few hundred acres in the entire world.