By Dick Cantwell

To Thine Own Beer Be True

One of the things I have always appreciated and enjoyed about our movement is the diversity of the people who have made it up, the differing professional backgrounds and experiences that have brought dozens of perspectives to what for so many of us was a sort of second (or third) career. It’s our own, bigger and geographically sprawling version of Black Mountain College, turning the sensibilities of the photographer, the software designer, the television producer and the writer (to say nothing of the waiter and bartender, cab driver and freshly graduated MBA) to the commonly designated aim of producing and selling fine beer and of resurrecting a moribund American industry. Relatively few of us have received formal training in the area in which we’ve chosen to spend our present careers (or maybe that’s just me), and as a gang of autodidacts we are our own best resource. Witness the popularity and success of such things as the Association of Brewers on-line Forum and more literal chat rooms like the various panel discussions at the Craft Brewers Conference. When somebody has a notion to try something new to themselves, it’s a fairly sure bet that a handful of others out there has tried it before, perhaps with varying degrees of success but always with stories to tell about the experience. In this way it’s possible to get the different perspectives of procedure and the limitations imposed by equipment, the variability of water and other raw materials, the quirkiness of statute and consumer response, all of which constitutes a hodgepodge with which to construct a personally viable way to move forward on a project.

But sometimes you need to have enough confidence in your own doubtful methods and achievements to leave well enough alone where all that information is concerned, whether imparted on-line and ad nauseum, or simply by way of a telephone conversation with your buddy across town; even in the context of that most convivial and insidious format of sitting down and sharing a beer. Sometimes it’s important to be strong and not so easily swayed by someone else’s accomplishment.

A couple of years ago I was sitting in the extremely pleasant pub at LaConner Brewing Company, not far north of Seattle. My friend and Head Brewer Arlen Harris was pulling out a bottle of this and that from the cellars. Somewhere in the sequence he opened a cork-finished bottle of the previous year’s tripel, which absolutely knocked me out (and not the way you might think—I still had to drive home). It was complex, fruity and well-aged. Its color was a touch darker than golden. And it was great. Now perhaps it was my mood at the time, but it struck me that it was everything I wanted my own tripel to be, which tends to the pale and the more restrainedly fruity side of the palette. A few minutes of conversation later, I had devised the rudiments of a new recipe.

Mood will do that to you. One’s momentary mojo can affect the way a beer strikes one—or a whole bunch of beers. I remember being disastrously routed and re-routed on a trip to Europe once, and trying while things were settled to make the best of a bad thing for a few days in London. I didn’t know then what I know now about beer and where to drink it, but I do remember that the whole time I didn’t enjoy a single beer. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. I’ve since come to believe that the flavor I didn’t like on that trip had more to do with the bilious tang of panic than it did with the state of that year’s Kent Goldings. I’m more disciplined now, naturally, generally able to be pretty objective about somebody else’s beer, but where my own is concerned I tend at times to play out some little shadow play of that day’s view of my world. I can’t recall what my psychological state was that day in LaConner, but I guess it’s safe to say I was spoiling for a change. So when it came time to brew the Bete Blanche, I changed my yeast and added a touch of color, and made a beer so much less interesting than usual that I couldn’t wait to be done with it. Others were more charitable, but the consensus was that I should have left well enough alone. This year we switched back essentially to the old recipe, and the result was terrific—especially the bottle-conditioned version. We even won a medal with it at the GABF.

But that isn’t where this story ends. Arlen himself, meanwhile, was playing out his own little zymurgical crisis, this time with regard to his pilsner and how he felt it compared to mine. Let me hasten to say that the LaConner Pilsner is an excellent beer, wonderfully pale and with a nice series of malt notes to accompany all those Continental hops. But Arlen kept finding the relatively darker color and more aggressive bitterness of my Zephyrus more what he had in mind. He also kept finding it in his refrigerator, put there by his wife, but perhaps the less said about that the better. So he got to fiddling, and once more where this narrative is concerned, produced a pilsner that wasn’t at all bad, but didn’t stand on its own the way his had for him (for years) and the way mine did for me. He changed back, too, and all of the pilsner drinkers in the area thank him for it.

We can all learn a lot from each other, obviously. One of the things we can learn is that we ourselves sometimes make some pretty good beer. And that occasionally we should just accept compliments from our peers and patrons and recognize that at times others have a better view on what we do than we do ourselves. They are our loyal customers and critics, and they don’t keep coming into our places or taking our beer off the shelves because they want us to change it. We reserve the right to occasionally overrule their opinions—we need to have some sense of power, after all—but we certainly shouldn’t completely discount them. It’s also best, I think, to have a couple of slightly different interpretations of a style to choose from and not simply two geographically differentiated versions of a single recipe. I’m sure I’m not alone in having consciously tried, on moving from one job to another, not simply to duplicate a successful recipe recently left behind, but to come up with a new, and newly individual, interpretation.

So Arlen and I have seen the error of our ways, which happily boils down simply to liking each other’s beer too much. We retain the privilege of learning from each other, and at times it gets a little complicated, like when one of us brews something that turns out to be an inter-county prototype. Have you tasted the official beer of this year’s Skagit Valley tulip festival? It’s kind of similar to my Golden Gorgon, but it was brewed at LaConner, with yeast Arlen got from me. I’ve got a magnum of it in my refrigerator, and I can’t wait to drink it.