Past Newsletters
Vol. 6 No. 2
| Brewery | Beers Featured |
| Karl Strauss Brewing Company | Karl Strauss Amber Lager |
| Pioneer/Wisconsin Brewing Company | Wisconsin Rainbow Red Ale |
| Pioneer/Wisconsin Brewing Company | Wisconsin Whitetail Cream Ale |
| Oldenberg Brewing Company | Old Premium Verum |
Karl Strauss Brewing Company
Karl Strauss’ Old Columbia Brewery & Grill opened its doors to the public on February 2, 1989. At the time it opened, it was the first new brewery of any kind to open in the city of San Diego in more than fifty years. Karl Strauss Amber Lager was the first beer brewed at Old Columbia, and on opening day it was served along with Gaslamp Gold Ale and Downtown After Dark Brown Ale as the first 3 beers on tap. In 1991, the brewery expanded by building a second brewery to produce and distribute their Amber Lager.
Founder Karl Strauss is one of the world’s most recognized master brewers and was the first and only person to ever receive the Master Brewers Association of the Americas’ Award of Honor and Merit, considered to be the highest of honors in the American Brewing Industry. More than 65 years of brewing expertise are reflected in the superb quality of the brewery’s product line which is comprised of over 35 different recipes which are brewed and served from the three San Diego breweries and brewpubs.
For more information about the brewery and scheduled tours, call (619) 234-BREW or check out their web site at www.karlstrauss.com.
Serving Temperature: 40-45° F
Original Gravity: 12.5° Plato
Final Gravity: N/A
Int'l Bittering Units: 24.0
Alcohol by Volume: 4.0%
Currently the brewery’s only bottled product, Karl Strauss Amber Lager is brewed with a combination of two row pale, Munich, Dextrin, and Caramel malts. Karl adds both Clusters and Cascade hops in equal proportions during the boil primarily for their bittering contributions. A proprietary yeast strain is used. Look for a sweet, caramel maltiness up front with some hop spiciness evident in the nose. Note good head retention in this medium-bodied, clear, copper-to-amber colored beer. Karl Strauss Amber Lager starts off with a sweet, caramel flavor as its nose indicates. The sweetness carries into the middle, however this beer ends with a mild bitter/dry finish. Overall, one of the better American interpretations of an amber lager we’ve tried.
Pioneer/Wisconsin Brewing Company
So you’ve got one from California, now how about something from the Midwest? The Wisconsin-based Pioneer Brewing Company puts mainstream Midwest beers like Old Style and Stag to shame! The Pioneer Brewing Company has a fascinating and somewhat misfortunate history.
In 1856, Ulrich Oderbolz founded the original brewery in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Tragedies dogged the Oderbolz family. In the late 1880’s, Charlie Oderbolz fell into a boiling vat of beer. The teenage son of Ulrich Oderbolz managed to pull himself from the vat but died hours later. His father only survived him by a few years. In 1900, Frank Oderbolz, the eldest son of the founder, took over operation of the brewery. Frank Oderbolz drowned in a boating accident at the falls themselves 11 years later and the family subsequently sold the brewery to local businessmen. The brewery reopened as The Badger Brewing Company, but was closed shortly thereafter during due to that prohibition thang.
Brothers Dave and Jim Hellman purchased and refurbished the old building in 1996 and renamed the brewery back to the Pioneer Brewing Company. By June of 1997, their first beers were ready for sale. And now, over 140 years later Pioneer Brewing Company continues the tradition, offering beers brewed at the original location. In 1998 Pioneer purchased the Wisconsin Brewing Company brands and moved production from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin back to the Black River Falls site. Today Pioneer produces Pioneer Pale Ale, Pioneer Lager and Black River Red under the Pioneer label. Badger Porter, Whitetail Cream Ale, Rainbow Red Ale and Woodchuck Wheat are produced under the Wisconsin label.
For more information about the brewery and scheduled tours, call (715) 284-7553 or check out their web site at www.cuttingedge.net/~pioneer.
Serving Temperature: 40-45° F
Original Gravity: 14.9° Plato
Final Gravity: N/A
Int'l Bittering Units: 42.0
Alcohol by Volume: 4.7%
Rainbow Red is brewed with a combination of two row Pale "Briess", Caramel and Belgian aromatic malts. The brewery hops this well-balanced American Red Ale generously with both Willamette and Nugget hops in two additions to the boil. Look for a deep red color in this medium-bodied, filtered Red Ale. We found the nose to be a predominantly floral hoppiness with some sweet caramel maltiness evident. Note a well-balanced spicy nugget hop and caramel malty character in the body and a very prominent spicy Willamette hop finish. Overall, a very nice red ale. You’re gonna like it!
Serving Temperature: 38-44° F
Original Gravity: 11.4° Plato
Final Gravity: N/A
Int'l Bittering Units: 36.0
Alcohol by Volume: 4.2%
Whitetail is not your traditional Cream Ale which is normally a light-bodied style that we wouldn’t feature. This one’s a Cream Ale with some character and body! Brewed with two row pale malts and Belgian Wheat grains, this pale colored ale offers a full spicy hop nose. It’s hopped with both Tettnang and Willamette hops. We found the flavor to be crisp and clean on the palate and full of a fresh hops! Look for a clean, bitter hop finish. Overall, although it’s not really brewed true to style, that’s a GOOD THING! The best "Cream Ale" we’ve evaluated to date.
Oldenberg Brewing Company
The Oldenberg Brewery, founded in 1987 as a private venture, is located 5 miles south of Cincinnati, Ohio in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. In November, 1995, Oldenberg Enterprises, Inc. offered 800,000 shares of Oldenberg stock for public sale and raised $1.96 million for the operation and expansion of the newly formed Oldenberg Brewing Company. By January 1996 all of the offered shares had been purchased by slightly more than 2,000 enthusiastic beer lovers. In 1998 the brewery produced approximately 7,890 barrels of distinctively flavored, high quality beer for distribution throughout the Ohio Valley area. The Oldenberg Brewing Company consists of the Oldenberg Brewery Restaurant chain, the Holy Grail Brew Pub in Cincinnati, Ohio and the Oldenberg brewery itself.
Brewmaster, Ken Schierberg, has been employed by the brewing company from the very beginning in 1987. He hired on as an Assistant Master Brewer, and in 1990 was promoted to Master Brewer. Prior to 1987, Ken clocked over 11 years in the brewing industry in the Wiedemann brewing division of the G. Heleman Brewing Co. and with the Hudepohl Brewing Co. of Cincinnati where he served in quality control and brewhouse supervisor positions. Ken is a member of the Master Brewers of America and is a professional judge each year for the Great American Beer Festival.
For more information about the brewery and scheduled tours, call (606) 341-7223 or check out their web site at www.oldenberg.com.
Serving Temperature: 38-43° F
Original Gravity: 10.5° Plato
Final Gravity: N/A
Int'l Bittering Units: 14.0
Alcohol by Volume: 3.8%
Oldenberg’s Old Premium Verum is a traditional German amber lager brewed with a combination of two row pale, Munich, and Black Patent malts. Old Verum is hopped with both Czechoslovakian Saaz and Cascade hops. Look for good head retention is this amber colored, medium-bodied, filtered lager. Note a caramel malty nose and body with some floral hop character evident as well. We found this amber lager to be well-balanced, clean and very flavorful. Overall, a great interpretation of a style that is rarely brewed in America.
Ask Murl
Dear Murl,
What is the difference between 2 row malted barley and 6 Row malted barley? What would happen if there were a slight mix of the two types of the malt and would it affect the taste of the beer? Your answers to these questions would be much appreciated.
Anonymous.
Dear Anonymous,
What’s up with the Anonymous Pal? I hope you’re not embarrassed by the stupidity of your question or anything. Har Har. Just pullin’ your chain my friend. What the hell is that supposed to mean anyway... "pulling your chain". Is it some kind of reference to indentured dogs on short leases or what? I don’t get it. I had a choker collar for about three hours once and every time they pulled my chain, I sat my ass down and wouldn’t move. Never saw it again.
Anyway, it’s actually a great question. Of course, any question that I think I might be able to answer qualifies in my book as a "great" question. Generally speaking, two row malted barley is considered amongst brewers to be a higher quality grain primarily as it provides better yields per quantity used than 6 row grains. Two row grains, as the name indicates only have two rows of grain on each stalk and the resultant is larger grains and thereby more malt/starch and less husk per kernel. Six row is about 10% cheaper and is used more by large breweries and inbred backward-ass hillbilly still owners with names like Billy-Fred and Timmy-Jo. Mixing two and six row shouldn’t alter the flavor profile enough to notice, though it may throw off your recipe quantities if it calls for one or the other. Hope that clears it up for ya Big A.
Woof!
Murl.
Food For Thought...
Kick Strauss Chili
Karl Strauss would probably have preferred we list some kind of sausage/sauerkraut/potato German recipe to make use of his Amber Lager, but hey, we didn’t tell him how to brew his beer and this is America Baby... Where mass consumption of Beer, Burgers and Chili is the order of the day at any Red-blooded BBQ! On that note, here’s a list of food. When you mix it all up and cook it, it tastes real good. Be sure and save a beer or two from your shipment to cool your engine.
- 2 lbs kidney beans
- 2 ½ lbs hamburger
- 1 onion
- 1 green pepper
- 1 TBS salt
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 6 cloves garlic
- 3 TBS chili powder
- 1 ½ TBS dry mustard
- 24 oz. Karl Strauss Amber Lager
- 12 oz. tomato paste
Soak beans in water 12 hours and then simmer over medium heat until tender. Lightly brown beef and caramelize onion in same pan. Discard fat (or donate it to your local McDonald French fry cooker). Combine sugar, garlic, chili powder and mustard with 12 ounces of brew and simmer for 15 min. Add tomato paste to beans and combine with all of that other stuff we just had you do. Simmer for 2 hours adding remaining 12 ounces of beer during the last 10 minutes. Roll up your sleeves, fill a big bowl with the stuff and maybe schlapp a sizable dollop-o-sour cream smack dab in the middle of it all.
Source: Great American Beer Cookbook, Candy Schermerhorn, Brewers Publications, Boulder, CO.
Norm's Corner...
As spoken by Cheers' Norm
Norm: (coming in from the rain) Evening, everybody.
Sam: Still pouring, Norm?
Norm: That’s funny, I was about to ask you the same thing.
True Brew Facts
THE CELEBRATOR BEER NEWS - You don’t have to attend medical school to become a doktor. Each year, thousands of people throughout the country receive Beer Doktor awards at Oktoberfest celebrations in such places as Frankenmeuth, Michigan; Kitchener, Ontario; and Munich, Germany. A Beer Doktor Award is presented to anyone who can drink a "humpen" (23.5) of beer without taking their lips from the glass. Although the title of Doktor is indeed prestigious, the compensation is not nearly as rewarding as the real deal!
ALL ABOUT BEER - To publicize the opening of a nightclub in Hamburg, Germany, a public relations firm came up with a promotional idea right off the top of their heads. They invited all of the city’s barbers to a special party. Within a month the new club was booming. The talkative barbers, as expected, had told all their customers about the evening. And everyone was especially well-groomed after the event.
BEER: THE MAGAZINE - Billy Carter, the late brother of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, had a beer named after him. In recognition of the "Billy Beer" honor, he said, "For me the beer thing was a natural, ‘cause I know a good beer better than anybody. Who knows? Maybe I’ll become the Colonel Sanders of beer." Following Billy’s death in 1988, an ad appeared in a New York newspaper, advertising six-packs of Billy Beer for the incredible sum of $9,000 each! Ever try the stuff? Nasty. Figures I tossed my beer can collection in ‘82.
MIDWEST BEER NOTES - The owner of a Fort Lauderdale laundromat took the drudgery out of doing the wash by selling beer and wine. He added another twist when the "suds" were flowing, a topless dancer. The Helpy-Selfy Laundromat didn’t have a cover charge but the cost of draft beer went up 35 cents a glass while the show was on. Local men were later found to have increased the number of times of doing their wash from once a month to twice a day.
Commander McBrew & Doc
Battle the Amazon Monkey Man
There are several ways that a person can cross Brazil from east to west. A flight from Leticia, where the Columbian, Peruvian and Brazilian boarders meet, to Manaus, a well-developed city in the heart of the Amazon, takes less than an hour. But no self-respecting explorer worth his salt would take the easy out when one could travel as the natives do, in a large cargo boat that followed the Amazon River itself.
There were two water beasts, both docked a little ways off the shoreline. It was a long, muddy trip to the first boat. Worty, my faithful comrade in consumption and travel, and I crossed a number of wooden planks set in the mud in order to reach it. As our Spanish skills accommodated us little in Portuguese-speaking Brazil, we resorted to drawing pictures and pantomiming our intentions to the point that we were convinced we had secured a place on this boat, leaving that night for Manaus.
The boat itself was fairly large, maybe 80 ft. or more in length. There were 3 levels to the vessel. The 1st was completely packed with cases of Brazil's finest brew, Antarctica Beer, enough of it for Wortly and I to never seriously consider the second boat. The next level consisted of living and eating areas while the top deck was nothing more than a roof that one could stand on.
Three hours into the first day, Worty and I concluded it high time to determine just how to get one of those 600 ml Antarcticas in our possession. When attempting to simply buy one, we found to our dismay that they were not indeed for sale. Thinking quickly, I bartered a small collection of Charlie’s Angels collectors baseball cards acquired for just such emergencies with a shifty deck hand for an unlimited four day supply of suds. A Commander must, by definition be resourceful in nature after all. With a couple of cool ones in hand, we headed for the roof, our soon to be designated point of collaboration and inebriation. As Wortly headed down for our 2nd round, an older gentleman approached me with two "tall boys". He sat down, Indian style, directly across from me, his eyes sparkling as he handed me the two beers and three packs of cigarettes. I tried to explain in Spanish that my friend was on his way back up with a round, but the message was never received. "Doc", as we later dubbed him, was very strong and liked to give a good, firm handshake on the average of one per minute. We would shake hands after each communication failure as if to say, "I have no idea what you are trying to tell me, but I think you're all right and we'll keep trying".
Wortly returned and we continued to try and communicate with the Doc. He showed us the book he was reading. It looked to be the equivalent of a 7th grade health class book. It had many different anatomical diagrams, photos of various diseases and other medical related illustrations. It had A LOT of illustrations. Doc showed us many of the pages, muttering this and that as if he were explaining something of critical importance to us. He showed us a photo of a naked woman, displaying some form of skin irritation. While narrating this particular photo, the Doc's voice took on a lighter, less serious tone. He smiled a lot. He managed to convey to us that he was studying this book so that he may someday practice medicine and hence his newly acquired nickname.
My nocturnal fantasies of scantily clad Amazonian tribeswomen eagerly awaiting my approval of their latest batch of Jungle Stout were rudely interrupted at the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. when the breakfast bell ran out resoundingly. Each morning at the same time, some Brazilian cabin boy beat the hell out of his bell as if pissed off that he had to get up to make breakfast and retaliating by ensuring that all rose with him. By six o'clock, more than half of the boat was permanently up and moving around as if they had somewhere to be, or better yet, something to do.
Time became incidental after a few days on the river, marked by dawn, dusk and meals. There really wasn't much to do at any point in time on the boat. I had a choice of several activities. Reading a book was always a good option. Lounging in the hammock to travel tunes while gazing at the river, another winner. Other than that, there were only the basic needs of Maslow's hierarchy of self-actualization to fulfill; eating, going to the bathroom and meeting Doc on the roof for a beer.
The boat made frequent stops throughout the day and night once we were underway, mostly in small towns and villages to drop off beer supplies, perhaps a few letters and then load bananas to be sold in Manaus. Often the entire town would come to meet us at the shoreline to watch the activity. It appeared that there was about as much to do on the shore of the river as there was to do on our boat. It disturbed us that our beer supply was rapidly diminishing and being replaced with bananas; they weren't even ripe yet.
On the morning of the second day on the river, a man boarded carrying a two banana leaf baskets, each with a small monkey tethered to it. He was apparently bringing them to Manaus to sell. That day, we witnessed this microbe of a man burning one of the monkeys with a cigarette to amuse his friends while it screamed helplessly. Intolerable! Blastfamy! Unacceptable. He had to be stopped. Thinking quickly, I had Doc invite the man to the roof to share a 5 gallon gourd of 3 year old Imperial Stout I had brewed in Bombay and was planning to barter in Manaus for our passage to Carnival. It was deceptively smooth hooch, an unnoticeable 15.6% alcohol by volume. I first considered drinking the snake into a stupor as we have done to our foe in many similar situations and then reconsidered and simply knocked him upside his underdeveloped cranium with the gourd while Worty caught his glass never spilling a drop. The time had come to free the monkeys. We cut the tethers and tossed our pawed pals to the shore, but not before allowing them both to urinate on their previous keeper’s head. When he awoke, he barely recalled the wild monkey attack as we described it and how the two escaped after rendering him unconscious. He most likely knew that we had something to do with their escape. We were the only gringos on the boat and I don't believe that the locals shared the same enthusiasm for the rights of a jungle monkey.
Our third night marked Wortly’s 30th birthday. We celebrated the evening by purchasing Doc and several newly acquired friends several rounds of Antarcticas. At one point, we struck common ground and found ourselves singing the first verse of "We are the World" over and over again. Doc was extremely pleased that he could make an attempt to speak our language. I wonder if he knew what he was saying or had any grasp whatsoever of the meaning to the lyrics. I found it ironic, but I may have been the only one.
The following morning we landed in the port of Manaus slightly hungover, but most certainly having reached a new level of bonded friendship with our Brazilian friends. We were satisfied in knowing we’d chosen the right form of travel. It had been time well spent, we had learned how to communicate without the benefit of a language with the assistance of our favorite malted beverage, and secured the lifetime services of a local physician-to-be deep in the heart of the Amazon. So we got that going for us... which is nice.
About the author: Commander McBrew has devoted his very existence to the exploration of foreign cultures and their malt beverages. He has traveled in over 109 countries, single-handedly saved himself and entire civilizations in at least 73 documented occurrences, and has consumed no less than 4,450 gallons of 2,156 different beers. He offers The Brew Harvest Review a dimension of worldliness through his varied and slightly exaggerated beers tales from abroad.
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