By Dick Cantwell

Five Generations of Brewing

It’s a love fest here in Seattle. So many of us in the local craft brewing industry used to work or home brew together or be small-scale rivals of each other or left to go work with Fal in California (or at least visit), we’re mostly all too confused (or experienced) to be entirely sure who it is we’re supposed to resent. We have an active and effective Brewers’ Guild, all aglow after apparently stopping a nefarious legislative attempt to up our brewery taxes by something like 900%; we mention each other whenever we’re interviewed on the radio; and we drink and appreciate each other’s beer. We even occasionally buy each other’s beer. The balance of power here where craft breweries is concerned has been lately fairly benign—the relevance of supremacy has faded to mere historical filagree—that whole notion is so, well, nineties, or perhaps so Oregon. We are almost all of us making better beer all the time, itself partly a result of the whole free exchange of ideas, expertise and personnel. Sales, for the most part, are strong, and we mostly just complain to pass the time in a familiar way. What, in such a setting of intellectual and commercial idyll, could possibly go wrong?

Well, all that was before the snake of Belgian ale yeast gained entrance to the garden. A few months ago I brewed a quaffing-weight Belgian-style golden ale as the first house beer for our new location in a vaguely more northerly part of Seattle. Where I often run a number of batches in order to optimize the cost and usefulness of an additional yeast, I this time instead passed it on after only one use to my friend Doug at Elliott Bay Brewing. An alum of Maritime Pacific Brewing (of which there are several scattered about), he brewed a ----. He then passed it on to our friend Bill, with whom I used to work at both Pike Place and Big Time. Bill now works for Hale’s, and somewhat incredibly he got the go-ahead to use an outside yeast in the friendly confines of Hale’s open fermenters for the first time in the --- years of that brewery’s existence. The fellows at Hale’s brewed a Tripel which they called Cerberus. A mean-spirited marketer might take some level of umbrage at the borrowing of a page out of Elysian’s book of classical and mythological reference, but you know?—that’s why they’re classics—they just keep coming up. I chose to take it as mild homage.

Some Belgian yeasts in my experience will diminish in character with each generation, leaving only whispered allusion to their origins after only a few re-pitchings, but after three uses, the yeast by all accounts was maintaining its Belgian-ness quite nicely. And a good thing, too, for its journey was not yet over. Bill passed the yeast on to Kevin at Big Time, with whom we both used to work at Pike Place. He also brewed a Tripel, the potentially dangerous Trombipulator, whose name and recipe I pioneered during my stint at Big Time, but which in anti-Dragnet fashion today retains nothing other than the name. At this point I stopped paying attention, but then found out in a conversation involving the borrowing of some Biscuit malt that our friend Tom at Far West Ireland Brewing had used the yeast to brew what he claimed was an oud bruin. What had happened to the yeast on the drive across the lake to generate the requisite sourness I’m not sure, but I suspect there were other more conscious factors involved. Not wanting the bad luck linked with breaking the chain to fall on his head, Tom passed the yeast on to a couple of other guys whose brewery affiliation I am somewhat hazy about, and who, a bit spooked by the fact that it was in a bucket, elected not to re-pitch, thereby ending the story.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Where’s the discord? Well, since this story involves the sub-radar doings of a bunch of brewers, there isn’t any to speak of. But just say that all five of these beers ended up competing with each other for a meaningful wholesale market share, with reps and heads of sales boasting and blustering and installing free draft systems and the like in an effort to maintain a toehold for their specialty product and their specialty product alone. Just say that such a thing were to happen in New York, or Tai Pei. Such a scenario was, if not anticipated, extrapolated by one of my partners harder-headed than myself to the extent that for me to re-enact the entertaining train wreck involved with sharing a single distinctive yeast among five or so breweries I may have to do so without telling him. And don’t tell the yeast broker, either—there may be copyright issues. Or any of the other owners and managers at the breweries concerned.

For the moment, however, this project is still very much alive. We’ll be having a tasting, actually, at a venue yet to be determined (it might be one of ours, or perhaps a neutral site/tavern interested in lampreying onto our little episode of good fellowship). We’ve each set aside a quarter-barrel for the faithful. And what does all this have to do with DUI? Not a whole lot, since none of us will be driving home.