Review: Soproni

Soproni from Brau Union Hungária Sörgyárak / Soprony Brewery
Rating: C+

Sampled in the Budapest airport after missing my flight and cooling my heels to wait for the next one...

Appearance: Very golden in color, quite clear. One-finger white head, with decent retention and some lacing.

Smell: Flinty mineral character and adjuncty corn. Little in the way of hops in the nose.

Taste: On the whole, fairly light. Balanced bitterness, but slightly astringent aftertaste. Slightly spicy, continental hops. Mild bread note.

Mouthfeel: Quite creamy mouthfeel for the style, surprisingly so. Makes me wonder whether they might be using beer gas for this lager, instead of CO2, or if it's just a characteristic of the beer.

Drinkability: Decent for the style, but not very distinctive.

Welcome Home to America Beer?

I'll be arriving back in the U.S. on Thursday night after a year in Old Blighty and I am looking forward to pouring a good American craft beer to celebrate my return. The question is, which beer to choose?

I figure it should meet the following criteria:

• it should (of course!) be American-made
• it should be quintessentially American, stylistically
• it should not have been readily available in the UK (this eliminates, for example, Sierra Nevada Celebration and Anchor Liberty, which I was able to track down in Cambridge)

I am open to suggestions! I have a couple of possibilities in mind, but I'd like to see what others might put forward.

Beer and Civilization Haiku

I recently posted on the connection between beer and the dawn of civilization. Now there's a beer haiku to go with the theme:

In the beginning
We came together for beer.
It still sustains us

Back from Budapest

Apologies for the light posting: I was in Budapest this past week for something work-related, and will be moving back to the other side of the Atlantic later this week.

Packing up to move is, as usual, a horrific experience. I'm looking at the collection of beer glasses I've accumulated over the last year and trying to decide whether I should ship them home or not. Having already dropped >£100 on shipping less fragile items, I am hesitant.

Anyone have a favorite method of protecting/shipping glassware?

World's Largest Beer Brand Now Chinese

The Chinese beer market has long been extremely regional, with only Tsingtao cutting across provincial barriers to become a true national brand. Now it has competition:

SABMiller's Chinese beer brand, Snow, is set to sell 10bn pints this year - overtaking Anheuser Busch's Bud Light to become the world's largest beer brand.

The company entered the market in 2002 with a Chinese joint venture partner and invested heavily in the country's only mainstream national beer brand sold across all the provinces - overtaking Tsingtao Breweries in 2006.

I'm actually quite surprised to hear this, as Tsingtao has a respected tradition, and long-standing distribution networks (alcoholic beverage distribution in China is notoriously corrupt and fragmented). Economies of scale backed by foreign capital, coupled with aggressive distribution, may explain part of Snow's success:

But despite Snow's growth, profitability for SABMiller is low. Snow accounts for 18% of its global beer volumes, but less than five per cent of profits.

Though prices rose in the past year, the average price for half a litre of Snow is still only two Chinese yuan - 16p.

For what it's worth, I found Snow undrinkable when I sampled it in Beijing last year. Stories like this make me question why I will be moving to the beer wasteland that is China this December.

Guided Beer Tastings

I hosted a couple of beer tastings over the last year at St John's. When preparing for each, it was a challenge to present as much of the world of beer flavor as possible in as accessible a way as possible.

In order to make beer styles easily understood, I decided to categorize each beer into one of three categories, based upon which ingredient it focuses on: malt, hops, or yeast. I think this is a pretty simple way to guide people to look for particular flavors in the beer they're drinking and to explain where they are coming from. For example, a weizen is yeast-focused, an IPA is hops focused, and a stout is malt-focused. I would progress in a general order from lighter to heavier.

I decided to offer seven "primary" beers with enough for everyone to have a reasonable-sized glass, and then ordered smaller quantities of five more beers which may not be to everyone's taste. At the end of the guided portion of the tasting, I introduced each briefly and invited everyone to sample what sounded interesting (in addition to polishing off whatever was left of the primary beers).

For the primary beers, I offered the followingall ordered from Bacchanalia, on Mill Rd:

• Andechs Hefeweiss
• Cooper's Sparkling Ale
• Goose Island IPA (Sierra Nevada Celebration in the first tasting, which unfortunately was sold out by the time of the second)
  
• La Rulles Triple
• Andechs Doppelbock
• Rochefort 8
• and Samuel Smith Imperial Stout

I also ordered smaller amounts of beers which I thought people might appreciate an opportunity to taste, but not everyone would like a full glass of, including:

• Drie Fonteinen Doesjel
• Lieffmans Kriek
• Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Marzen
• XX Bitter
• Pyraser Dunkelweizen

Favorites of those attending seemed to be the Rochefort, the IPA, the hefeweizen and the kriek, while the rauchbier had people talking for days after about "liquid bacon."

For those who were present at one of these tastings, did attending change the way you think of order beer? What would you have liked to have been done differently?

For other readers, what do you think of this approach and categorization? How have beer tastings you've attended been presented? Would you suggest any changes or substitutions to the list for next time?

Sake Brewer Develops "Super Yeast"

In a slight detour from beer, Japanese sake brewer Gekkeikan has developed a new "super yeast:"

Gekkeikan... has announced the development of a new "super yeast" able to produce cellulosic ethanol from non-edible parts of plants, such as paddy straw and chaff. The super yeast that produces alcohol was created with genetic engineering, by integrating koji mold genes that produce cellulolytic enzymes into sake yeast.

Good progress toward making biofuels economically feasible (via Instapundit).

Beer Photo of the Day

The famous Hofbrauhaus in Munich, in today's beer photo:

I enjoyed my visit there in December. Great photo by flickr user gaina.

Around the World in 80 Beers

Hugo forwards an "Around the World in 80 Beers" promotional email from travel site Kayak:

It's the stuff dreams are made of - going to the world's biggest drinking session with all your friends. Germany's Oktoberfest offers the perfect opportunity...over two weeks of festivities dedicated to that magic elixir of water, hops, malt and barley. Head over to Munich for the biggest party in the world. Don some lederhosen, break out that bratwurst and sing folksongs to your heart's content. Not your style? We've found a few other places where you can cleanse your palate. So come on all you swiggers, swillers and sippers and get thee to a brewery!

The destinations with current specials include Brussels, Prague, Munich, Sydney and Philadelphia.

My flight back to the United States on Zoom Airlines was canceled this week after the airline went bankrupt. Luckily, I was able to find a replacement quickly yesterday on Sidestep, Kayak's American equivalent. Great way to find cheap fares with a fixed date, and highly recommended, although I wish they offered a price calendar feature like Skyscanner, which allows you to quickly see which day is cheapest to fly.

NYT on Session Beer

Leedy writes in with a story from The New York Times on the growing trend among craft brewers to produce more low alcohol, "sessionable" beer:

“We’ve all been saying the same thing for about 18 months now, which is, enough of the high octane.”

Mr. Feinberg imports boozy Trappist and farmhouse ales, but in April he introduced a brew from another Belgian tradition: bières de table.

“When I lived there in the late ’70s and early ’80s,” he said of his time in Belgium, “everybody drank it for lunch, from grandmothers to kids.”

His new import, Brasserie Dupont’s spicy, yeasty Avril, is all of 3.5 percent alcohol. By comparison, the brewery’s more famous farmhouse ale, Saison Dupont, is 6.5 percent.

As Lew Bryson says, low alcohol does not have to mean low flavor!