Burningham - My beer year: adventures with hop farmers, craft brewers, chefs, beer sommeliers, and fanatical drinkers as a beer master in training

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Roost Books

An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.

4720 Walnut Street

Boulder, Colorado 80301

roostbooks.com

2016 by Lucy Burningham

Cover art by Egor Zaharov/colourbox.com and mart/provector/shutterstock. Cover design by Daniel Urban-Brown.

Beer Tasting Sheet by Rob Hill, Certified Cicerone, copyright 2010 by Total Wine & More, reprinted by permission of the author. Craft Brew Alliance Sensory Ballot reprinted by permission of the Craft Brew Alliance.

The section constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Burningham, Lucy, author.

Title: My beer year: adventures with hop farmers, craft brewers, chefs, beer sommeliers, and fanatical drinkers as a beer master in training / Lucy Burningham.

Description: First edition. | Boulder : Roost Books, an imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc., [2016] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016010941 | eISBN: 978-0-8348-4053-9 | ISBN 9781611802719 (pbk.: acid-free paper)

Subjects: LCSH: BrewersBiography. | Beer industryBiography. | Beer. | Burningham, LucyTravel.

Classification: LCC TP573.5.A1 B87 2016 | DDC 338.4/766342dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016010941

FOR TONY

You can, you should, and if youre brave enough to start, you will.

STEPHEN KING

ONE SPRING DAY, I stood in my kitchen and poured a bottle of India Pale Ale into a pint glass with the habitualness of someone making coffee or chopping an onion. Since Id moved to Portland, Oregon, drinking craft beer had become a common ritual for me, but something about this ale seemed out of the ordinary. It demanded my full attention, starting with its vibrant orange hue and intermittent bubbles that pressed to the surface in neat lines like a festive Cava. As I finished pouring, a compact layer of creamy foam materialized on top. The beer smelled like a tangerine peel in the dead of winter, and the white head reminded me of citrus pith. I took a sip, and a spike of bitterness eased into warm earth and crushed blossoms. Something complicated was happening, a song between the beer and my senses.

Years later, I would think of that beer and regret that I didnt know much about it. I was the prince at the ball, and the beer snuck away before midnight. I didnt know its name, where it was brewed, or its alcohol content by volume. I didnt know what varieties of hops created the floral aromas or during which phase of brewing they were added. I didnt know where those hops were grown or who had bred them. I didnt know what was in the grain bill or how the brewer had kept the yeast healthy. I didnt know if Id met the brewer or set foot in the brewery where the beer was made. I didnt know whether the beer had won any medals or, instead, had slipped into the canon of unspectacular ales that no one cared about except for me. I didnt know if it had traveled in a refrigerated truck during a heat wave or a container ship during an ice storm. I didnt know whether the beer was inspired by tears or love, the profound or the mundane. Mostly, I didnt know why I liked it so much.

Even though beer is one of the worlds most ubiquitous beverages, at the time I had just begun to find it fascinating. Archeologists believe humans have been making beer since about 7000 B.C.E., a few thousand years after our ancestors started farming grains. In the modern world, the liquid sloshes inside ceramic pitchers on dinner tables in France and weights aluminum cans in Japanese vending machines. Its made over fires outside of South African houses. Beer is a staple, a social lubricant, a safe alternative to questionable water, and an object of worship. It lives in barrels, travels through tubes, burps and foams in kitchens, and explodes in heated rooms.

In 2005 I moved to Portland, Oregon, with my then-boyfriend, Tony. Right away, we took up a new hobby: sampling the multitude of beers brewed in our new town. How could we resist? Most Portlanders talked about beer with the passion and intensity of crazed sports fans, the kinds who sleep in jerseys and battle with depression after their team loses the championship. These beer fans rattled off stats, from International Bitterness Units to original gravities. They knew brewers nicknames and resumes. They spent weekends visiting obscure breweries they guessed would become the next big thing. They spread rumors about infections and defections. They were possessed by something I couldnt understand that transcended flavor and taste. Together, the beer and the people formed a unique symbiotic relationship, which forced me to entertain what seemed like a radical thought at the time: beer is an expression of place.

Being interested in beer was a slightly improbable turn of events for someone from Salt Lake City, Utah. I hardly knew about the drink growing up. Until I was a teenager, my parents didnt drink alcohol, so I never saw a single beer in our fridge. I had my first beer in high school, something skunky in a bottle, which I drank while watching a Bob Marley video in a basement rec room. Even before I was of legal drinking age, I resented how the beer sold in Utah grocery stores and gas stations was watered down (the law mandates 4 percent or less alcohol by volume). You could buy real beer with higher alcohol contents through state-run liquor stores, places that felt threatening to those of us with fake IDs. Besides, the liquor-store beer was expensive and stored at room temperature; you really had to plan ahead to have a cold one. One sound will always remind me of Utah beer: When Tony and I started dating, we developed an unspoken ban on drinking craft beer at home, an extravagance we chose not to afford. Instead wed buy eighteen-packs of Busch from the grocery store. Tony would dump the cans into the refrigerator crisper drawer that never held vegetables, a percussive moment that was frequently followed by the pssst of a can being opened. In Utah, kegs were illegal, so I never went to keggers, nor saw anyone do a keg stand. Instead, I heard stories of people being pulled over and ticketed for having kegs in their car on the way back from Wyoming.

The summer I was nineteen years old, I worked as a busser in a restaurant in a canyon in Salt Lake City. The restaurants only beer on tap was a locally brewed raspberry wheat ale that tasted like artificial candy. I secretly sipped the beer between bus-tub hauls of egg-smeared plates and empty coffee mugs, and I would smell a strange iteration of fruit seeping from my pores after a long shift.

I had my first dark beer on a brisk fall night in Missoula, Montana, inside my friend Garretts apartment a few blocks from the train tracks. Not only did the label of the Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout look sophisticated, like our conversations about literature (we were English majors, after all), but in our glasses the beerblack, opaque, and enigmaticlooked sophisticated too. With one silky sip, I felt like Id been initiated into a secret club. This was only a few weeks after my mom had come to visit and, at a place that served pizza with exotic toppings like mango and prosciutto, shed ordered a beer named Moose Drool solely because of the name. When the beer touched her lips, she had closed her eyes and smiled serenely. It was the first time I saw someone derive such pure pleasure from a pint.