This column appears on page 4 of the May 2012 print issue, which you can download or view here.
Terroir is a commonly expressed concept in the wine world, roughly meaning a sense of place that is channeled through a wine. Wine is often a more agricultural product than beer, allowing for a purer expression of soil, sun, precipitation, heat, and other natural elements that are unique to a place. Even different blocks in a single vineyard have the potential to express unique terroir in the wines that they produce, or so the wine world often says.
Beer is almost always a more industrial product than wine. Sure, the mass-produced wines of the world lack almost any sense of place, but even the most rustic of beers goes through a great deal of processing before it fills your glass. Barley must be malted, hops are dried and pelletized, yeast is carefully isolated and grown in sterile lab conditions. Then these ingredients must be brought together through complicated processes in the brewery. Beer arises from a gathering of ingredients that are sometimes specific to a place, but those ingredients and the process of brewing with them are subject to the choices of a brewer, maltster, hop farmer at the minimum. In the end, beer doesn’t have terroir so much as it has style, tradition, and context; however, these elements can come together to reflect a place just a powerfully as any wine.
In the past, brewers had little choice of what beer they could make. A brewer in Munich two hundred years ago would have had dark malt made from local barley, hops from the neighboring Hallertau region, hard well water, and some sort of mixed-strain, cold-tolerant yeast to work with. He had no choice but to make a malty, dark lager beer. Across Europe, local limitations and laws on ingredients and technology narrowed choices, and local tastes then helped to form what we now know as classic beer styles. This is an over-simplification, but the contrast to the present is real. Brewers today have unprecedented choice in deciding what their beer will taste like. Barley and hops are grown on wide enough scales that you can get almost any ingredients anywhere in the world. Dozens of yeast strains can be ordered express to your brewery in amounts ready to ferment a batch of beer. Water is chemically analyzed and recreated using purification and then additions of mineral salts (as I discussed last month). The Bavarian brewer of today is able to order almost unlimited combinations of ingredients from which to make his beer. But he doesn’t, because he brews with style, tradition, and context. Munich still represents a handful of classic styles of beer to the world: dunkel, helles, doppelbock, weisse, and märzen being the dominant ones. These are biéres de terroir if you will–hopelessly evocative of their native region, just as a Chateauneuf-du-Pape evokes the stony soils of France’s southern Rhone. If you travel north to Bamberg, you’ll find a handful of breweries making smokey, dark rauchbier, something you would never find in Munich. Travel further still and you are in Dusseldorf on the Rhine, where you can find hoppy, dark ales dominating the pubs. Make your way back to the west coast of North America and you can find comfort in a hoppy pale ale.
Given the options modern brewers have, and the relative lack of American brewing heritage outside of light lager, how do we craft beer with style, tradition, and context? I can brew a great saison or helles in California, but does that beer lose its context because it’s not from its traditional home? Those beers already have a home. When we brew them here, are we just borrowing someone else’s tradition? Then there is also the context in which we drink. Bitter is not the same outside of an English pub, and kölsch is just a blond ale outside of Cologne. The ritual of consumption in these cases can be just as important as the beer itself. I’ve had plenty of competent and even great American copies of traditional styles, but I never find them quite as satisfying as a maß of helles at the Augustiner Keller in Munich, or a hand-pulled pint of Fullers Chiswick Bitter in London. Do we have the same context while enjoying a pint of IPA in the sun on the patio of our favorite local brewpub? How about an Anchor Steam in San Francisco?
Beer culture and local style do not happen overnight. Despite a market dominated by decades of increasingly insipid lager, we’re doing pretty well for ourselves. American IPA and hoppy beer in general seem to be our biggest contribution so far. If American craft beer has a signature flavor, it’s due to this miraculous spice, particularly the newer varieties being grown in the Pacific Northwest (and now even San Diego County) that display powerful aromatic profiles that contrast starkly with most old-world varieties. While American ale brewing is firmly rooted in the English ale tradition, the use of these hops to dominate the flavor profiles of our beer has undeniably created a signature style. Cascade is the classic American hop, famously the aromatic signature of Anchor’s Liberty Ale and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, two of the earliest hoppy pale ales brewed during the craft beer renaissance. Its spicy, resiny grapefruit aroma has driven craft brewing since it originally graced those beers in the 1970s. Newer varietals like Centennial, Amarillo, Simcoe, and Citra have pushed the original citrus profile into even bolder, fruitier territory. In a reverse of the original importation of brewing techniques and styles, European brewers are now beginning to use these new American hop varieties to craft beers with an American flavor. I think there is still work to be done on crafting truly American/West Coast beer, but the future is looking hoppy.
Now don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t mean to say that only beers reflecting local style are worth drinking or brewing. Beer is an inherently fragile beverage, best consumed in the peak of freshness in most cases. I love being able to find a fresh, English-style ale from a local brewery because when I am in the mood, I find it preferable to a likely stale, imported ale that is a shadow of itself when consumed fresh on its home turf. The best part of American brewing these days is that we can have it all. I look forward to a future where outstanding and faithful renditions of classic styles continue to be brewed alongside new and interesting beers that reflect our unique West Coast brewing style.