Last time I surfaced on these virtual pages I was on my way to Boston for the Extreme Beer Festival, specifically the Night of the Barrels. If I were a novelist instead of a beer writer, I would probably spin a long story about how I ended up in Boston on one of those weird extended beer drinking odysseys -- perhaps a month long pubcrawl where I and my beer-seeking friends stumble from pub to pub sampling whatever we can find and stirring up trouble along the way. While the excursion to Boston was exciting, the aftermath was anticlimactic with me ending up with a microbiological infestation of the lungs which prevented my enjoyment of beer for almost two weeks.
I did scribble a notebook full of observations while in Boston and shot some 150 photographs, but I didn't get down to the hard work of transforming this rough material into the fabric of narrative until I returned to Long Island. It took me almost an entire week to write-up this Boston beer adventure in rough form. That's when the bug bit me and reduced me to drinking nothing but tea, orange juice, and chicken broth.
It wasn't my idea to go to the Extreme Beer Festival in Boston. Usually, when I see the word "extreme" and "beer" paired together I run the other way. The reason for this is that over the years I've grown tired of syrupy, under-attenuated, alcohol bombs. The thirsty beer drinker in me wants to tilt back a glass and slake that seemingly unquenchable thirst that constantly plagues me. Also, if I'm going to sip on something, give me a single malt scotch. Heresy! you say?
I admit a prejudice against "extreme beers" that is not deserved and is shaped more by my non-systematic and idiosyncratic tasting habits. For example, when I think of "extreme beer" I think of barleywine or imperial this or double that. To be frank, I've had very few Imperial Pilsners that were improvements on their less imperial cousins. I've also balked (perhaps unfairly) at what I perceived of as a trend in beer making and consuming that was more concerned with machismo than taste. You know what I mean -- the idea that you are more of a man if you can pound down three pints of barleywine than your buddy who is sticking with the cask conditioned mild or ordinary bitter. What about those hop heads? Going for the 100 plus IBU beers. Do people really like those beers or do they have compensation issues?
It's a good thing that I went to the Night of the Barrels because that experience showed me what the term "extreme beer" really means. So what is extreme beer, really?
Extreme beer is one of those terms with a temporally sliding meaning. Extreme beer today is tomorrow's normal beer. Basically, extreme beer is any beer that is on the cutting (bleeding?) edge of the flavor-aroma-alcohol phase space. Extreme beer is the ever expanding surface defined by the maximal points on a multi-axis graph. Alcoholic content and IBUs are only two possible axes. We could probably define at least a dozen different flavor axes: acidic, sweet, smoky, malty, etc.
What I learned at the Night of the Barrels specifically is that brewers here in the US are starting to learn and experiment with the complexity and multiplicity of flavors introduced by barrel aging and blending beer. It's not just about alcohol and IBUs. It's about the flavor.
Comments
Stan Hieronymus - March 15, 2007 9:33 AM
Donavan,
I've noted this in the discussion at Lew Bryon's blog and too many times at Appellation Beer, but I have a problem with this:
"Extreme beer is one of those terms with a temporally sliding meaning. Extreme beer today is tomorrow's normal beer."
To me a sliding meaning has little meaning. It has been suggested that Sierra Nevada Pale Ale was once extreme. Trying to sell it -- an all-malt, bottle-conditioned beer was well as one with hop character -- was certainly a radical idea, but the beer wasn't extreme.
If you ski Silverton Mountain (north of Durango) it will be extreme everytime. You might get to know it better and you may learn to be a better skiier, so the thought of tackling it will seem less radical, but it's still going to be extreme.
But thanks for sticking up for experimentation.
Alan - March 15, 2007 10:24 AM
I don't know if that analogy works, Stan. My sport of skill is/was soccer and after enough playing I can do somethings in terms of playing a long cross onto someone's hairline or threading a pass that I would have thought impossible when I was, say, trying to get into shape at the outset of a season. I think Donavan's point could be reframed as aclimatization. We have out point of comfort shifted naturally by our experiences. <p>That makes the problem of "extreme" as a definition plain - it is a relative term, both to the alternatives and the individual's experience. Unlike defining fine beer as such, a superlative, extreme beer will always be contextual and framed by what is available and not as extreme.
Donavan - March 15, 2007 2:54 PM
I appreciate Alan's defense of my take on the term "extreme beer". And I think Alan has it pretty much right. Not sure why a sliding meaning would cause Stan to scratch his head, since dynamical systems (including social constructs and personal preference) must have a time variable. If anything, what I said was banal, even trite. But most breakthroughs in personal understanding seem banal in hindsight. The Night of the Barrels was an experiential breakthrough for me since it changed my whole concept of what people mean when they say extreme beer. And that my friends is the subject of my next post.