Beervana Podcast

On June 11th, Portland’s English-themed, pro-cask Away Days Brewery hosts a cask ale festival with several regional breweries. As you know, Jeff and I love cask ale and have been promoting it for over a decade—all to little apparent effect. Something changed in the past few years, though, and now several Portland-area breweries have regular cask offerings (we toured a chunk of them on a podcast extra between Shows 155 and 156). That something may very well be Away Days, which has shown the kind of sustained commitment to cask that has helped raise its profile in the city. In advance of the fest, we wanted to sit down and talk to some folks from the brewery

Old breweries compact time and preserve it. The hands of old brewers are evident in every dent and scuff. Their habits are preserved in the movements of the brewers they trained. When I stepped into Caledonian’s brewhouse, wort steaming and foaming in weird bespoke coppers, it might have well been 1869.

On today's show we hear from Kjetil Dale, one of two dozen or so farmhouse brewers practicing an ancient craft in the western Norwegian valley of Voss. Brewing here is knitted into the culture of the region, beginning in the classic eldhus, or "firehouse," common on farms here. As the fire crackles nearby, Kjetil describes this tradition and some of his background.

Beer tasting: Kings and Daughters / https://kingsanddaughters.com/

If you’ve been following us on social media, you’ve probably seen some photos Jeff posted from his recent visit to Norway. He was invited to participate at the Oslo Craft Beer Festival. We’ll hear about that and what he learned of the Norwegian beer scene. Craft beer is only about twenty years old, but the brewing tradition goes back centuries—and perhaps millennia. While he was in Norway, Jeff visited three breweries that melded the old and new traditions.

Beer tasting: Juice Jr. from Great Notion / https://greatnotion.com/

On Show 159, we are joined by Tobias Hahn and Nick Greiner, founders of the Rosenstadt Brewery. They tell us about their unusual approach to the business, what it’s like to focus on German beer in the American Northwest, and how gemütlichkeit fits into all this.

Way, way back in Pod 16, Jeff and I tackled the Trappist beers of Belgium. In the time since that program aired, four new monastic breweries have opened, and in all a baker’s dozen have started in the past decade. We thought it would be fun to revisit monastic brewing, discuss whether abbey ales are more or less a style with their arrivals, and taste a couple of the new ones.

Among living beer styles, rare is the is the case where a single beer accounts for the survival of a whole tradition, but it’s mostly true in the case of saison. Well, a single beer, an English writer, and an American importer.

The Labor Department recently reported that inflation was up 7.9% over the past year, sending the stock markets down, and causing the Federal Reserve to begin raising interest rates. This news landed amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one of the biggest grain producers in the world. Add to that the rising costs of aluminum, a historically bad year for barley, and high gas prices, and it’s clear that the cost of your pint of beer is almost certainly likely to rise. We thought it would be a perfect time to bring in the Beeronomist and walk us through the issues surrounding inflation, including the way it affects buyer behavior.

Beers tasted today: Cloudburst Kevin!!! and Reuben's Dream Team

Throughout most of the past ten thousand years, brewing was a farmhouse chore, one of the many ways people preserved their harvest throughout the year. In more recent times it has become a commercial and industrial activity. Yet in a verdant pocket of Loudoun County, Virginia about an hour NW of Washington DC, the husband and wife team of Bonnie and John Branding are conducting an ambitious experiment. They’ve revived farmhouse brewing, growing their own barley, using wild yeast from the land, and brewing it up in a barn. On today’s show, we’re going to hear their story and learn how they’re making this work in a 21st-century world.

Our Friday: a two-mile, four-pub crawl (with a short tram ride) where we stopped in and had our choice of two cask beers at each location. We encountered three milds along the walk.

The crawl happened in Portland, Oregon.

Because we're podcast professionals, we recorded our thoughts at each stop. Have a listen and learn about this remarkable development.