Clean glassware is essential for proper beer service, and I’m not talking about that filmy, smeary glass they served your water in at the Bug Tussle Diner. I’m talking about “beer clean” glassware. That means a glass that is totally free of grease, soap, and all other residue and detritus. This is a glass that will sheet water the way the old Cascade dishwasher soap commercials used to boast about. Only a beer clean glass will give you that nice fluffy head of foam when you pour and pretty lacing as you drink down.

MN Clean Pint is an effort to reward bars and restaurants that serve your beer in a properly cleaned glass. It’s an opportunity for you to recognize establishments that make the extra effort and give them the chance to win the coveted title of “Cleanest Pint in MN.”

To participate all you need do is photograph that laced-up, beer-clean glass wherever you may be enjoying a frosty one. Post the photo on Twitter during the month of February using the tag #MNCleanpint, identifying what fine watering hole has met the test. By doing so you also register yourself to win prizes including a $100 bar tab, online Cicerone™ training, glassware, a kegerator kit, and much much more.

MN Clean Pint is sponsored by JJ Taylor, A Perfect Pint, The Better Beer Society, The Cicerone Certification Program, MNBeer, and Micromatic. Go here to find out more.

Now get out there and fight for your right to clean glassware!

The Southwestern Wisconsin town of Woodman has a population just over 100. At one time it was the terminus of the “Dinky”, a narrow-guage railroad that connected it to the towns of Boscobel and Fennimore. Of course at that time Woodman was a bit more bustling, with residents numbering in the thousands. The Dinky used to drop mail it passed the post office in Woodman, announcing its arrival with a toot of its whistle. The Dinky tracks are still in the ground behind the Whistle Stop Restaurant, and the kitchen still doubles as the town’s post office.

In almost every way the Whistle Stop is what you would expect from a restaurant/tavern in a tiny Wisconsin town. The décor is simple; it’s relatively unadorned save for the Bud and Miller Lite posters on the walls. The tables are covered with the requisite red and white checked tablecloths. There is taco night on Tuesday and an all-you-can-eat Friday night fish fry. A small number of locals sit around the bar talking and drinking beer. On a busy night they might be joined by bikers. The thing that makes the Whistle Stop unique is the beer that they are drinking. It’s brewed on sight.

After Dennis Erb and his mother Leslie bought the restaurant in 2008, Dennis started looking for a way to make the place a little more special. He started making beer there in 2010. With no prior brewing experience, he has leapt right in, constructing a home-made, half-barrel, electric brewery in the basement. During summer high-season he brews every other day. That’s essential given the six house-brewed taps and numerous bottle selections he keeps available. He also sells a limited amount of bottles in area stores.

Erb says that his brewery is like “Dogfish Head on a smaller scale.” The comparison is not entirely undeserved. Many of the beers in his lineup are one of a kind. There’s pistachio kölsch, hazelnut red stout, the minty-bitter Arctic IPA, and Rose Red, a red-ale brewed with rose hips and rose extract. He takes inspiration from all around him. Sometimes it’s something he sees in the grocery store. Or maybe he reads about an exotic location and sets his mind to translating it into beer.  As he talks about it, the joy he derives from the process is evident. The experiments don’t always work, but when they do they are surprisingly tasty. And you have to give him credit for going out on a limb in a place where Busch Light is king.

Ordering beer at the Whistle Stop is a bit of a crap shoot. About half of the beers I tried were sour; unintentional, but not always entirely bad. Those that hadn’t “gone Belgian” were actually pretty good. There was the deceptively drinkable Amber Bock, a dangerous seven-percenter that drank more like it was four or five percent.  I approached the mint-infused Arctic IPA with trepidation. It ended up being one of my favorites of the night. While the smell of spearmint was intense, the flavor was just enough to enhance the already minty Northern Brewer hops. And the floral rose-hip/rose extract ale was a downright, champagne-like delight.

The food at the Whistle Stop was good as well. My bacon double burger was prepared by postmaster Leslie Erb herself. It was delicious. The French fries were nice and crisp.

Oh, and there is supposedly a ghost.

If you tend to geek out on style guidelines or can’t control yourself when presented with a beer that’s gone over to the other side, then don’t go to the Whistle Stop. If you are looking to have fun tasting some very interesting beers and chatting up the super- friendly locals, then this place is for you. Check it out next time you find yourself in the southwest corner of Wisconsin.

Within three days of launch, Mankato Brewery had already sold 30-barrels of beer. That’s 930 gallons, the entire capacity of one of the brewery’s three fermentation tanks. The rapid sales took them by surprise. When I visited on Thursday, January 12^th they had only one sixth-barrel keg left in the cooler and had ramped up their brewing schedule as much as possible. After only a week in business, they are already shopping for more tanks. It’s a good problem for a new brewery to have.

I first talked to Mankato Brewery co-founder Tim Tupy for a June 2010 article on The Heavy Table food blog. At that time Tupy and his partner Tony Feuchtenberger were just getting started. Their website was mostly a space-filler. They had yet to nail down a space. And their search for a brewer was just beginning. They needed someone willing to build the brewery and the brand from the ground up, and willing to relocate to Mankato. As it happens, Mike Miziorko, then a brewer at Summit, was looking for just such an opportunity. He read the Heavy Table article and picked up the phone to call Tupy. In July of last year he celebrated his last day at Summit and headed south to join the team.

The three view themselves as the legs of a three-legged stool. Each one brings a different talent to the partnership. Tupy is an entrepreneur with marketing experience and deep connections in the civic life of Mankato. Feuchtenberger’s background is in production and operations management. Miziorko is the man who makes the beer. Of his switch from Summit’s 220-hectolieter, fully-automated system to the much-smaller and totally-manual 15-barrel brewery at Mankato Miziorko says, “This is brewing. This is what I went to school for. I’m much closer to the beer.” He’s enjoying the ability to put his stamp on the thing from build-out to beers.

Tupy began considering the idea of opening a brewery a few years ago. He’s active in several civic organizations, which makes him well connected to what’s happening in Mankato. He saw a demand. People still had a connection to the old Mankato Brewing Company that closed in the 1960s. Kato beer signs and t-shirts were a common sight. His entrepreneurial spirit – he’s already opened two other businesses – said “let’s go.” He approached his homebrewing buddy Feuchtenberger and the two began to plan. A public brew day at the Brau Brothers brewery in nearby Lucan, Minnesota sealed their resolve. Within three months they had the basics together and started their search for a brewer.

Mankato Brewery launched on January 5th with their flagship beer Mankato Original. Original is a classic Kölsch-style beer. The crisp, lager-like ale has bready malt flavor and subtle fruitiness in the nose. Spicy hops and moderate bitterness keep it balanced but leave it light and delicate. In talking about the beer, Miziorko, who’s college major was German, quotes and old German saying that the “first beer should ask for the third.” My first-hand experience says that the third goes down just as easily as the first.

Miziorko appreciates the subtle complexity of German beer styles. To him they are beers with both depth and drinkability. “I’m a beer drinker,” he says. “I want to be able to enjoy more than one.” He has spent a good deal of time in Germany and admires the sense of community and tradition that surrounds beer there. Beer is a staple of life; it’s food.  He says that beer drinking there is less about the beer and more about the time spent drinking it. “That’s Gemūtlichkeit.”

Mankato Brewery is only distributing in Mankato and St. Peter. If you want the beer, you’ll have to go there to get it. There are plans to introduce other year-round beers and a few seasonals, but those will have to wait until they can keep up with demand for Original.

I’m telling you, the rush of new breweries in Minnesota just can’t be stopped. Every time I turn around I learn about another one on the horizon that I had never heard of. On a trip out to the Lucid brewery today, I had the pleasure of speaking to Broc Krekelberg, one of the threesome behind Badger Hill Brewing Company, a new, soon-to-be brewery in the Twin Cities metro.

Badger Hill is still a couple months away from selling beer. They are still waiting for their brewers notice from the TTB to be able to get started. They expect that soon. They plan to launch with an ESB style beer. Other beers planned will be designed for a wide palate. A double IPA or the odd Belgian may be in the mix down the road, but the brewery’s focus will be on more sessionable beer styles. Kölsch was one that was mentioned.

Badger Hill will be brewing at Lucid Brewery in Minnetonka, taking advantage of the federal designation called alternating proprietorship that allows them to have their own brewer’s license while operating in another brewery’s space. It’s not contract brewing, they are a full-fledged brewery sharing equipment and space with another brewery. They have purchased and installed their own fermenters and have plans to bring in a bottling line, which would also allow Lucid to package their brews. Krekelberg emphasized how glad they are to have hooked up with Jon and Eric at Lucid. The chemistry between them is great and the arrangement has allowed Badger Hill to get up and running more quickly and with lower up-front capital needs.

I’m happy to welcome another new brewer to the state. I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from Badger Hill Brewing very soon.

Driving to Rolling Meadows Brewery you might forget that you are only seven miles from downtown Springfield, Illinois. As you leave town, the four-lane state highway becomes a two-lane and the signs of city life quickly thin out. Leaving the main road, you follow a barely-improved rural road through rolling farm land until it dead-ends at a dirt driveway. The farmstead at the end of that driveway is the home of Rolling Meadows.

The tiny building that houses the brewery looks as though it belongs in the “holler.” I halfway expected Loretta Lynn to step onto the keg and barrel-filled porch singing Coal Miner’s Daughter. Once you step inside it’s a different picture. The building was purpose-built for making beer. What seems to be a tiny, country cabin is in reality a two-story production facility with grain mill, office and tasting table overlooking the brewery in the lower level. It’s got a sleek, modern design that matches the brewery’s branding and labels. The foundation would support a 7-story building.

Rolling Meadows Brewery opened its doors in mid-2011. Founder and Brewer Chris Trudeau is one of a few in the craft-beer world seeking to return brewing to the land (up here closer to the Twin Cities think Dave’s Brewfarm and Olvalde Farm and Brewery). A hop variety that has grown wild on the farm for years is cultivated in a hop yard out back. Herbs and spices used in brewing are tended in a greenhouse. A field next to the brewery will supply wheat for the brewery’s Springfield Wheat hefeweizen.

Rolling Meadows currently has three beers distributed in the immediate Springfield area. Lincoln Lager is an amber, American-style lager. Springfield Wheat is a classic German hefeweizen. Abe’s Ale is a strong-ish, American brown ale brewed with maple syrup, brown sugar, and Belgian candi-sugar. I liked all three, but my favorite was Lincoln’s Lager.

Here’s my notes:

Lincoln’s Lager
Rolling Meadows Brewery, Springfield, Illinois
Style: American Amber Lager
Serving Style: 22 oz. Bottle

Aroma: White bread with the crust on and the lightest touch of graham-cracker. Limes and spice linger somewhere just underneath, not quite cracking the surface, but not quite going un-noticed. A pleasant and delicate balance.

Appearance: Amber and mostly clear, with just the faintest gauze of haze. White head stood up tall and persisted, falling slowly to a rocky layer of foam on the surface. Nice lacing on the glass.

Flavor: Simple and balanced. Slightly malt forward, with bread crust flavors leading the way. But the hops don’t let go easily. I wouldn’t call it boldly bitter, but it does something more than balance the malt with bitterness that lingers and grabs after the swallow. Spicy hops flavor with tart hints of lime citrus play over the top. Crisp and sharp.

Mouthfeel: Light body. Medium carbonation. Maybe a wee bit of astringency.

Overall Impression: Crisp and sharp as a lager should be. Light and drinkable as an American lager should be. Beer nerds may turn up their noses at this one, but I like it. It doesn’t demand your attention, but it does satisfy. At $10 for a 22-ounce bottle I’m not sure it’s worth the price point. It’s very good, but good American-style lagers can be had for far less.

I have a bevy of new classes upcoming at Cooks of Crocus Hill. If you have never been to a class at Cooks, it’s high time you checked them out. You can learn about a wide range of culinary topics from scotch and steaks to how to boil water.  There are demonstration and participation classes taught by some of the area’s best chefs and beverage experts. Two locations, St. Paul and Edina, make it convenient from many areas of the metro. And in my experience (of course I’m teaching them so I may be biased) these classes are a blast.

Home Brewing 101
January 5, 2012, 6-9 pm
Cost $65
You can make good beer at home, and you can do it right the first time around. Cicerone Michael from A Perfect Pint will familiarize you with all of the ingredients, equipment, techniques and processes necessary to make extract beer at home. We’ll also taste several commercial examples of beginner-appropriate beers.
Menu: Light Appetizers and Samples of a Variety of Beers.

Bon Bons and Brews
February 9, 2012, 6-9 pm
Cost $70
With Chocolatier Randy Kingsbury
Beer and chocolate. Yeah, maybe it sounds a little weird. But believe it – nothing goes better with silky-smooth, chocolaty-rich truffles than beer. Add exotic ingredients to the chocolate and the pairing adventure really gets going. Chocolatier Randy Kingsbury and Cicerone Michael Agnew take you on an indulgent tour of the best pairings this taste team has to offer.
Menu: A Selection of Exotic Truffles Paired with Microbrewed Beers from Around the Country.

Best of the Best Beer & Wine Pairing Dinner
February 15, 2012, 6-9 pm (WAIT LIST)
Cost $75
With sommelier Leslee Miller and Chef Mike Shannon
Cooks’ favorite trio, Chef Mike Shannon, Sommelier Leslee Miller and Cicerone Michael Agnew, are back to share some of their favorite trios — of food, wine and beer, that is! They’ve picked the best and most popular taste teams from all of the classes they’ve taught together. Whether you’ve missed their classes and hope to catch up, or you’d just like to come back for more, join Mike, Leslee and Michael for an evening of their greatest hits! You’ll taste their best bites and sips while learning all about how to make some stellar combinations of your own at home.
Menu: Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Vinaigrette; Roasted Root Vegetables with Herbed Aioli; Pot Roast with Shallots; Truffled Baked Potato Skins; Smore Pot de Creme.

Beer, Wine, and Cheese Throwdown
February 20, 2012, 6-9 pm
Cost $75
With sommelier Leslee Miller and France 44 cheesmonger Song Lee
Cheese please! Cheese pairs perfectly to both beer and wine, but Leslee and Michael demand that you to pick a winner. Join Cheesemonger Song Lee from France 44 with Sommelier Leslee and Cicerone Michael for this awesome libation- and fromage-a-thon. A variety of milks, textures and styles make this cheese-off one for the books when both sommelier and cicerone stand off in an epic challenge to tickle your palate.
Menu: Artisanal Cheeses Paired with a Global Selection of Beer and Wine.

The class list for the spring semester hasn’t been released yet, but here’s a sneak preview of my classes.

Spring Beer & Wine Dinner
April 4, 2012
With Leslee Miller and Mike Shannon. This will sell out quickly.

Local Brews & Breweries
May 22, 2012
Take a beer tour of the region.

Friek = Framboise and Kriek. To make this beer the Odell brewers take a wild-fermented Kriek beer, lambic with cherries, and add locally-sourced raspberries just before blending as one would to make a Framboise, lambic with raspberries. Thus, their Kreik becomes a Friek.

Here’s my notes:

Friek
Odell Brewing Co., Ft Collins, Colorado
Style: Fruit Lambic
Serving Style: 750 ml Bottle

Aroma: Cherry pie with bready crust. A bit of vinegar with leathery, earthy, and horse-blanket wild yeast character. Loads of fresh fruit; tart berries and cherries.

Appearance: Strawberry red and very clear. Low, white head that dissipated quickly, leaving fine lace on the surface. Champagne-like bubbles.

Flavor: Wheaty malt flavors burst through the fruit and the funk, providing some residual sweetness to balance the sour. The fruit comes on strong with tart berry and cherry notes. Acidity is lower than one would expect from the aroma, but it’s plenty tart. The finish is a bit muddy. It could be drier and crisper.

Mouthfeel: Mouth-filling like a wheat beer. Spritzy carbonation that tickles the tongue.

Overall Impression: This is a beautiful beer. It’s fruity, but not sweet. It’s sour, but balanced by wheaty malt. This beer will please sour beer heads and likely be tasty to those who haven’t yet come around.

Jeremy Cowan, the owner and chief shtickster at Shmaltz Brewing Company, was the first brewery owner I interviewed. We met in 2008 at City Beer in San Francisco (a great beer store/beer bar, and a must-stop if you are in the Bay Area). Over a couple of hours and more than a couple of beers we talked about Shmaltz, beer, politics, the hop crisis, and Palo Alto real-estate. The man’s brain seemed to run at abnormal speeds. “Shtick” came to him with extraordinary ease, which together with the beers made for an entertaining conversation to say the least.

Reading his recently released book Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah, I almost felt like I had been transported back to that table. It’s written as Cowan speaks. His sense of humor and lightning wit pervades every page. Self-deprecating anecdotes and tales of his personal explorations of Jewishness reveal a deeper soul hidden beneath. The story-line sometimes gets diverted onto tangents, but always manages to find its way back to the center a few paragraphs or pages further on.

Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah, written with James Sullivan, tells the story of the first thirteen years of Shmaltz Brewing Company from its genesis in the late 1980s as an in-joke among volleyball-playing friends to hard-won profitability in the early 2010s. The journey reveals the inner-workings of both the craft-beer industry and Cowan’s mind. The reader goes along with Cowan on sometimes humorously-awkward ride-alongs with distributor reps attempting to sell a case here and a case there. The long hours and financial struggles involved in building a beer brand are described in such vivid detail that it should make one think twice about starting such a project.

At the same time Cowan lets us in on the personal price paid, from crack-fueled parties and broken relationships to a complete mental and emotional breakdown culminating in an attempt to sell the business. But it is ultimately his boundless energy and stubborn determination to make the business prosper – or even turn a profit – that holds the story together.

The conversational tone of the writing was sometimes too much. I found myself at times wanting more traditional structure and narrative to help me make sense of things. Keeping track of names and relationships proved a difficult task throughout the book. While necessary for setting the stage, I found the early, pre-Shmaltz portions of the book to be less interesting and less well-written. I sometimes had difficulty following the story. Once the first batch of beer is brewed however, the book definitely picks up steam.

Craft Beer Bar Mitzah is a good read for anyone interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the beer industry and must-read for anyone starting on the path to owning a brewery, especially those who choose to go the contract brewing route. It’s an object lesson in what not to do, and sometimes what to do, to make your business succeed.

On Saturday, Lift Bridge Brewing Company will celebrate the release of The Commander, an English-style barleywine aged in bourbon barrels from the Heaven Hill Distillery. It’s the brewery’s first barleywine, and also the first of what will hopefully be a long string of big-bottle, limited-batch releases.

The beer takes its name from the Commander grain elevator that towers over the city at the edge of the river just south of the lift bridge. The beer is as commanding at the building. At 12.5% ABV, it’s a bruiser of a beer. It’s as big in flavor as it is high in alcohol. Here’s my notes:

The Commander
Lift Bridge Brewing Company, Stillwater, Minnesota
Style: English Barleywine
Serving Style: 750 ml Bottle

Aroma: Poured into a small snifter, the aromas rise boldly from the glass. Bourbon and wood. Toasted oak and vanilla. Toffee. Lightly sweet with hints of golden raisins and alcohol.

Appearance: Clear. Jewel-like, dark-amber color with ruby highlights. The moderate off-white head dissipated fairly quickly into a fine film on the surface.

Flavor: Toffee, Toffee, Toffee! Brown sugar, vanilla, and bourbon work with the toffee to remind me of the Brach’s Chews I used to enjoy at my grandparents’ house, except that these are laced with alcohol. Wisps of orange citrus, oaky tannins, and still those golden raisins. Cardamom gives a unique fruitiness. Bitterness is moderate, just enough to keep it from being too sweet. It’s helped along by the abundant and boozy alcohol. As it warms it takes on tones of gooey caramel.

Mouthfeel: It makes my lips numb after just a couple of sips. Medium-full body, but well attenuated. Assertively warming.

Overall Impression: There is a lot going on in this beer. Toffee, cardamom fruitiness, bourbon, wood, and vanilla. It goes on and on and gets deeper as it warms. It’s delicious, but maybe a bit young. The flavors strike me as not quite melding. The main detractor is the prominent alcohol. It is quite boozy. My whole mouth was numb by the end of the first glass and the alcohol flavor was getting in the way. I think age will treat this one very, very well. The bottle says to drink it before 2020. That seems about right. Drink one now. Bury another one in the cellar and forget about it. It will be a great discovery years down the road.

The release party is happening at the Lift Bridge brewery in Stillwater on Saturday, November 19th from 3-8 pm. You’ll get to sample the beer, buy a bottle (limit 6), and participate in some fun and games while you’re at it. The website says this beer is so limited that it may not be made available in stores. If you want a bottle, best get your butt to the party. You can read more details about the event on the website.

Part 2: Beer and Food Pairing

Can I veer into beer and food? You wrote the book that I refer to almost every day, The Brewmaster’s Table. How did you get interested in beer/food pairing to begin with?

Doing it. From day-one when I started doing professional brewing in 1989, the beer dinner was always one of the main ways that you got your beer out in front of people. And as the whole Food Network thing developed and you had chefs being made into rock stars, it kind of occurred to me that at the time that people didn’t necessarily respect craft beer. They didn’t understand it. But people respected chefs and they respected food. So if you tied craft beer to food and people saw how well the beer worked with the food, the kind of glow of respect that the food got shined onto the beer. I think it’s kind of changing these days in that we don’t always need the food to reflect that glow upon us. The beer has its own thing.

Brewmaster’s Table was written from a point of view of not only information, but also pure utility. I’m having pork chops. I’m doing it with this and this. I’m going to have a soft drink, or I’m going to have wine, maybe some people drink cocktails with dinner, or sake or whatever else. But basically most people are going to have a soft drink of some sort, or wine, or beer. So assuming that your choice is beer, beer has a much broader range of pairing ability. Well, what should I do?

And I’d watch people shop for beer and they’d walk up and down the aisles. They clearly didn’t know what was in the bottles and what to do with it. I think the questions that people have are pretty straight-forward. You know, the number one question asked of sommeliers is not, “What is the loam content of the soil in the Loire valley?” They want to know red or white with chicken? What’s the best wine to have with thanksgiving dinner? People want to know basic things. What is it? What does it taste like? Who made it? Why is it interesting? What do I do with it? And then around that you can build something which is interesting and entertaining.

Over the years I’ve done about 700 or 800 beer dinners in over a dozen countries, everywhere from little neighborhood restaurants to some of the most expensive restaurants in the world. Beer belongs at all these places. And we want to demonstrate that beer is an everyday luxury. It’s something that almost everyone can afford. A decent beer will cost you often less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks. And so really, it sounds grandiose to say it, but every day can be made better than it would have been otherwise.

What makes a great beer/food pairing? What is it about a particular combination that makes you say “wow?”

Well I think beer has a particularly superior ability to do harmony. Wine is largely contrast based. You have steak and you have a glass of cabernet. The flavor of the steak does not actually have anything to do with the flavor of the cabernet. When you’re putting the cabernet with the steak, what you’re essentially doing is putting almost like a fruit sauce on the steak. And that works in a kind of contrasting way. You have caramelization and salt, the flavors that are in the steak, and then you have this opposite flavor from the wine.

In the case of beer, you can do contrast and harmony at the same time. I can bring a roasted flavor or a caramelized flavor that harmonizes with the flavors in the steak, and some bitterness, some sweetness, and some fruitiness to do the contrast part. And that’s what makes what I call the flavor hook, that part of the beer’s flavor that grabs onto part of the food flavor. And so often with the best pairings, the beer is interacting with the food in two or three different ways. It’s doing contrast, and harmony, and various accentuations. You definitely are looking for 1 + 1 = 3. 1 + 1 = 2 is easy. It’s really about getting to that third thing where something is greater than the sum of the parts.

Good beer in general is becoming more and more accepted and popular. The concept of beer and food pairing is becoming accepted. Or to take it even further, beer and food pairing is now being thought about…

What’s happening is that it’s mainstreaming. It’s becoming mainstream. If you looked at 2011’s biggest trends in national restaurant news you will see beer and food pairing. And so something which sounded exotic 10 or 15 years ago is becoming routine. And that’s something that I have been saying. Craft beer is not a trend or a fad, it’s simply a return to normality. We’re like one-third or one-quarter of the way to getting back the level of variety that we used to have going back a hundred years and that we’ve largely forgotten about. We had thousands of breweries and we brewed every kind of beer in the world. And now we’re just kind of regaining all of that stuff. We used to have a fascinating food culture that brought in everybody’s immigrant roots. That kind of got paved over in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Everybody said, “Okay, I want to be an American. I’m going to eat meat and potatoes.” And now everything re-differentiates. You see that in what’s happening in the supermarket. You go to Whole Foods and there’s a whole wall of olive oils. There used to be one olive oil or two olive oils. It’s like everything. As things that used to seem exotic become normal it’s a good thing for everybody. There’s more choice. Now, more choice also means people get waylaid or confused. It’s that thing where you walk in and there are a thousand things to choose from. Well which one do you choose? A little bit of information gives somebody the ability to go in and say, “Okay, I’d like to have that.” Otherwise you’re just looking at a wall of stuff.

That’s what happens to me when I go into the beer store.

At least you’re coming at it from the point that you know almost too much. You look at it and you can see how each one of these might be fun. That’s the other hard thing.

What about pairing beer and cheese?

The tricky thing about beer and cheese tastings is that the cheese in a moving target. You say stilton or something like that, but there’s a pretty wide range of what that cheese might be like. So any kind of information you can get on what kind of condition the cheese is likely to be in that day is helpful. Or if you know that a particular place likes to push their cheeses all the way out to their ripest point or you know that they tend to serve their cheeses fairly young, you can work with that to figure out how your pairing is likely to go.

Also, the funkier they get the harder it can be. So that part is always tricky. I try to ask as many questions as I can and also get my samples as close to the actual date, like if I can get my samples two days before we’re going to do the actual tasting. And I ask if it’s coming from the same wheel and the same place etc. That’s your best shot, because there’s only so much that’s going to change in a couple of days. But if you taste it three weeks beforehand or a month beforehand, well…

And I have my go-to pairings that, when I don’t have information in advance, I know a lot of cheeses pretty well so I can say, “These are the five sets we’re going to start with.” And I try to mix the various types. I would like one goat, at least one sheep, one washed-rind, one blue, and one cooked, firm cheese – cheddar type or usually a gruyere. That’s six. That gives you an opportunity to talk about the differences in milks and how the beers are interacting. Say with a saison or a Belgian witbier, how the beer interacts with the tangy quality that goat cheeses have. So I have favorite pairings when it comes to that.

And there are cheeses that I know are likely to be available even though they are good artisanally-made cheeses. For example, you have Cypress Grove Humboldt Fog. You know you can find it in a good cheese shop. You know you can get it even at Costco sometimes. So a person that has a Whole Foods somewhere near them is going to be able to get it. Then if we need to get more esoteric we can. You can teach people about what is wash-rind cheese. Now, as you have the flourishing of beers with Brett character, you know wash-rind cheeses go great with Brett. So you get a chance to tell these tales together.

When I’m doing events I like to help people figure out what kind of beer they gravitate towards. I focus it around ingredients, malt, hops, yeast. How do you approach this?

I do it somewhat differently in that kind of tasting. Like the cheese, I tend to cover ranges of flavor. I want you to understand the two main kinds of wheat beer, because I think they have great utility. You can drink them with so many different things. I want you to understand pale ales and IPAs. Bitterness. I want you to understand caramelization, roast, yeast character, usually represented by some of the Belgian beers where you have a lot of yeast character. I like to serve something with some vintage character.

So a typical beginners tasting might start off with a Belgian wheat beer, then go to weissbier. Then do a real pilsner and start talking about lagers. An IPA. Some sort of Belgian Abbey ale. Maybe a stout or imperial stout. And then a barleywine. Hopefully in there, if we have room to do it, one lambic so that we can show that end of things. Other variants that you can throw in there are like a saison, etc.

I can say that the one thing I have learned over the years, which should not have been a surprise, but was a big surprise, is never talk down to anybody. I can’t tell you how many times I have served Black Chocolate Stout, a big 10.2% imperial stout, to the little old lady, she’s 82 years old, she’s got a blue rinse, and she’s tasting it and saying, “Well I like this one the most. I’ve been looking for a beer like this for a long time.” And I’m like, “Wait, you have been looking for a beer like this? A 55 IBU, black, blow-your-head-off imperial stout. This is what you’re really into?” She’s like, “I don’t usually drink beer very much. I don’t really like beer. But this stuff is awesome.”

I came to realize that just because somebody came in saying that they don’t even like beer or that they’re a Coors Light drinker, or whatever else, doesn’t mean that you can’t have them walking out of there loving Schlenkerla Rauchbier. You have no idea what they are going to like, and neither do they. Your job when you are doing a tasting is to show them. “Here it comes. This is what you are about to taste. Get ready. And now we’re going to talk about the culture and the flavor and whatever else. And if that one is not for you, great.” But I don’t make the mistake any more of not putting stuff in front of people because I think they can’t handle it. Basically what you find out is that almost everybody can handle almost everything as long as you tell them what they are about to taste. My goal is that I want to go all the way there in a couple of hours. And maybe the end of the tasting will be a J.W. Lees Harvest Ale from 2005. My goal for the tasting is that I want to completely blow your mind. I want you to walk out of the room dazed and confused if you have never really come to beer before, and to walk out saying correctly, “I’ve been missing something. I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

Here’s the way I like to put it. Every enthusiasm you have, at some point there was a single moment of introduction. It might have been that you love baseball and your uncle took you to your first baseball game. You love jazz because somebody played you your first Miles Davis record. In that one moment, a little door opens up. On the other side of that door is a better life. And that’s a real thing. It’s an absolutely real thing. You will meet those people ten years later and they will tell you what you did for them. “That one day, in two hours, you changed my life.” And that is absolutely real. And that is the thing that we are here to bring to people. My job is to be the guy that opens that door up. And you’ve got to walk through it. That’s a great thing to be able to do. It may not be rocket science or brain surgery. But you know what? It’s at least as important. You’re going to make peoples’ lives better every day. If they love jazz, they can listen to jazz every day for the rest of their live. But if nobody every plays them the record, guess what. You’re not going to hear it. And the rest of your life you don’t get any of that. You lose that. People think we’re just going out slinging beer, but no, it isn’t that. You see how happy it makes people to have enthusiasms for things. To enjoy dinner every day a little bit more, hell, what else do you want?