Though it is often hard to see the connection in our modernized and industrialized society, beer is as much a product of Mother Nature as your favorite artisan bread or locally made cheese. The flashy cans, stainless steel brew kettles, and massive delivery trucks often obscure the fact that beer begins its humble journey in fields and valleys, sometimes closer than we even imagine.
Like agriculture and hangovers, brewing’s history extends as far back as civilization itself. Pat McGovern, a specialist of biomolecular archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania who is best known in the beer world for his work with Dogfish Head on their “Ancient Ales” line — including the excellent Midas Touch and the less than stellar Ta Hen Ket — has discovered and helped reproduce beer found in Egyptian tombs and Sumerian ruins. The degrees of separation between the cheap and plentiful ice-cold tall boys in our fridges and the Cradle of Civilization are thin and few.
When humans decided to settle down, kick back and stop all that hunting and gathering nonsense, agriculture was needed to make sure that all these new homebodies wouldn’t starve. Some of the most important fruits of this early labor were the familiar cereal grains — members of the grass family like oat, wheat, corn and barley — which eventually found their way into both bread and beer. The benefits become especially apparent in the ice-cold winter months, since beer could be brewed during the harvest and last all the way until spring and, unlike water for a good few thousand years, beer was sterile due to the necessary boiling step. Without beer many of our distant ancestors may have died from water-born bacteria and would have enjoyed the crushing task of subsistence farming a whole lot less.
But this column isn’t about history or anthropology, though both can be fun. That point is, beer has always been a part of the cycles of civilized life, harvested along with the other fall crops, stored in barrels all winter and enjoyed in bright spring afternoons. It is only recently that we have enjoyed access to most kinds of beer whenever we want. However, many brewers recognize the fact that not all drinkers want the same beers in every clime; imagine drinking a heavy imperial stout in the blazing summer sun. As many of you have noticed, the tap handles at your local watering hole change along with the temperature and hours of sunshine. Seasonal beers are one of the many things that make beer such a wonderful beverage, but there are some caveats to keep in mind before rushing off to the store.
Though most barley-based beer is brewed year round, many craft brewers and even some of the bigger guys in the business, most notably Boston Beer (Sam Adams), offer seasonal varieties to fit the changing clime and pallets of consumers.
These limited-time choices add exciting variety to your buying and drinking choices, spicing up (often literally) the normal barley/hops combination with unusual styles and ingredients.
Summer Beers: Shandies
Because we are still in the final throes of summer, we’ll begin with one popular example: the “summer shandy,” which is often found prominently on beer store floors or on bar taps from April through September. A combination of a lighter, sweeter beer — usually a lager like pilsner — and a fruit juice like lemonade, this traditional German style makes purists and beer snobs cringe.
Common criticisms tend to run along the lines of: “How dare you adulterate beer with juice!,” “This is too sweet! I’m going to die.,” “There’s barely any alcohol in here!,” “I can’t taste at least four kinds of hops!” The snobs saying such utterly misguided things are wrong.
Though shandies are not my preferred style, they are the perfect alternative to a Budweiser or similar no-frills lager on a hot summer day. The low-alcohol of shandies — running under five percent — usually keeps you from getting too dehydrated and lethargic in summertime heat. Moreover, its sweeter flavor profile and light body, or the “heaviness” of a beer, allow you to enjoy long drinking sessions like barbecues without feeling like you scorched your tongue with hops or guzzled a meal. For those interested in finding a shandy for the dwindling summer days, some of the easiest to find options are offerings from Leinenkugel’s, Shock Top, Saranac, Hoppin’ Frog out in Ohio and the Austrian company Stiegl.
However, since this is a column about the craftier side of beer, a caveat is in order: Leinenkugel’s and Shock Top are brands created and owned by Miller-Coors and Anheuser-Busch InBev respectively. Because my Golden Rule is “Drink what you like,” this should not be taken as an indictment or a condemnation of those beers, but consumers who intend to buy what they think is a craft beer (often at craft beer prices) should keep this in mind.
Though there is no one, true “summer beer,” most breweries put out a lighter, sweeter, lower-alcohol version of their normal offerings — take Sam Adams’ Summer Lager as one example — or a completely different style that generally have these qualities.
These can range from the ever-popular pilsner (like Troegs’ Sunshine Pils) to a light and flavorful blonde ale (Victory’s Summer Love) or the sweet and spicy witbier (Weyerbacher’s Blanche) or even Southern Hemisphere Harvest Fresh Hop Ale, which fermented on fresh hop cones with the summer harvest of places like New Zealand.
However, because fall is right around the corner, a new crop of seasonal offerings will soon start appearing on store shelves and summer choices may be harder to find.
Fall Beers: Pumpkin
Fall seasonals, moreso than their sunshiney counterparts, reflect the agricultural origins of brewing and the uniqueness of the East coast climate in their ingredients and styles. By and large, the most popular example of fall-style brew is “pumpkin beer,” often made with the mashed pulp of the gourd we associate so strongly with Pilgrims, flame-colored leaves and jacket-weather.
These beers harken back to the frontier styling of early American brewing culture, a time when everything and anything around was tossed into kettles, through their use of these generally unusual ingredients.
Unburdened by legal restrictions — such as the Bavarian Rheinheitsgebot, or purity law, that limited beer to barely — and under the pressure of material necessity, these early colonial suds were concocted from a variety of local materials that brewers in the Old World hadn’t even heard of yet. Gourds, like pumpkins, as well as adjuncts like molasses, provided the raw sweetness for fermentation and in place of hops — which were yet to be cultivated in the New World — pungent plant material like spruce and pin needles served as flavoring and bittering agents.
Usually heavily spiced with things like cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg, these beers are hearty, thick, sweet yet utterly sippable. Usually leaning to the boozier side, pumpkin beers are the best fireside drinking companions, perfect for ever-darkening and cool evenings. These beers are, for good reason, extremely popular with consumers, often bringing in more revenue than all other seasonal choices put together and consequently almost every East Coast brewer worth their salt has put out their own take on the style.
Because of my not-so-hidden envy of West Coast beer drinkers, I never pass up an opportunity to flaunt some of the East’s best qualities. The ubiquity of pumpkin beers in states like PA masks just how special they truly are. Some of the more enterprising and desperate members of beer-related sites like BeerAdvocate.com have been known to offer up huge amounts of beer and money to “trade” for pumpkin beers.
Which pumpkin beers are worth all that trouble? Some of the best examples are Southern Tier’s Imperial Pumpkin, Weyerbacher’s Imperial Pumpking and Dogfish Head’s wonderfully pungent but extremely drinkable Punkin’.
Though I hate to be a tease, I do intend to get back to the “caveats” of buying beer two weeks from now. Until then, ease your troubled minds and enjoy yourself by picking up seasonal beers. Get them while they’re good.
