Meet with Pete, a Beer Affair?
It’s the day before Thanksgiving and I suppose I should write a post regarding the holiday. I got a comment on one of my posts the other day that linked to a great post regarding choosing the appropriate beer to accompany one’s Thanksgiving meal. Besides being a great read and having interesting pairing recommendations, it was much better than anything I could’ve ever done. Besides, my family doesn’t really celebrate Thanksgiving traditionally. Sure, we’ll have a pineapple-glazed ham and a smoked turkey but those will be surrounded by Korean BBQ ribs, garlic and ginger seasoned crab, shrimp skewers along, my wife’s Jahmmee chicken wing dish with, perhaps, a blood stew or bile soup. Unfortunately my family’s beer of choice, despite my repeated efforts, continues to be Heineken.
Besides, I have something way more interesting, and beer related, to write about.
Mondays suck. We all know this. The weekend is over and the work week begins. Thankfully this past Monday had two great things going for it. First, it’s the Monday in short, 3-day work week. Second, I was able to meet up with Pete Slosberg of Pete’s Wicked Ale fame. Third, I was able to go to Wine Affairs and sample their winter beer offerings. Ménage à trois don’t get much better than that. Okay, ménage à trois can get much better than that, Yvonne Strahovski and Olivia Munn better, but it’s not bad for what it is.
I was introduced to Pete Slosberg via email by Jessica, aka The Thirsty Hopster. I followed up with Jessica’s introductory email by asking Pete if he wanted to meet up at Firehouse Brewery and Grill in Sunnyvale for lunch. Thankfully, he accepted. For those of you who don’t know who Pete Slosberg is, let me do a quick recap.
Pete used to be an executive at companies like Xerox, IBM and Rolm. He was never a big drinker in college but took up homebrewing one day. Working with an associate who was also a venture capatilist, the two came up with a list of criteria they wanted their next business to have. While the exact details are lost upon me now, the business model that fit their needs happened to be a micro brewery. With limited cash flow, Pete decided to contract out the brewing of his beer to various production breweries. A common practice, many breweries start off this way before earning enough capital to open up their own facilities. At this point, it was 1986 and the craft beer movement was just gaining traction. Pete eventually sold Pete’s Wicked Ale and started Cocoa Pete’s-a chocolate company. As with the brewery, he sold this as well.
So back to the present. I am at Firehouse where I meet up with Steve, their brewmaster, and Pete. Pete is dressed very casually in a hooded sweatshirt and shorts with his “signature” beard as seen on the Cocoa Pete’s logo. In that sense, he reminds me of Billy Mays. Neither man, as long as they’ll be using their likeness in business, can never shave their beards off. But I digress. About halfway through my burger, Pete whips out a container full of homemade chocolates. Even after he’s sold off his chocolate business, Pete continues to make chocolate for fun. At this point, we do a mini-tasting between the chocolates he’s made and the beers currently on tap at Firehouse. As usual, my notes are crap. Here’s what I wrote down buffered with my equally shoddy memory:
Chocolates
- Milk chocolate
- Dark chocolate with almonds
- Dark chocolate with cherries
- Milk chocolate with ginger
- Brioche made with dark chocolate and a hazelnut spread
Beers
- Hefeweizen
- Pale Ale
- Belgian Tripel
- Porter
- OTIS (One Tun Imperial Stout)
- Scotch ale
Pete instructs us to take a small bite out of chocolate pieces and let it melt on our tongues before taking a sip of the beer. We would know right away if the pairing was awesome or if was just ehhhhh. It was a very informal pairing with the three of us nibbling on chocolates and sipping beers and talking about what we tasted. Here are my brief notes regarding the tasting:
- Milk chocolate with the pale ale. This proved to be a contrast of flavors that most people might not like but I found very interesting.
- Dark almond with the porter. This was an example of a harmonious pairing in which you couldn’t really tell where one ended and the other began.
- Dark chocolate with cherris paired well with the Scotch ale. The maltiness and slight alcohol qualities worked well to bring out and accentuate the fruit sweetness of the chocolate. An example of a complimentary pairing.
- Dark chocolate with ginger paired with the Belgian tripel. This was the most interesting pairing. By itself, the chocolate had hints of ginger. Likewise, the Belgian tripel may have had ginger-like phenolic qualities. The two of them together really brought out the ginger flavors. It’s different, yet tasty.
- The brioche (chocolate and hazelnut) worked well with OTIS, another complimentary pairing.
This was an awesome exercise and it really opened my eyes to a lot of things chocolate related. To say there was a revelation at this table would be correct and I promise to reveal it all after Thanksgiving. At the very least, I want to learn how to make chocolates. Pete’s homemade stuff tasted awesome and learning how to make your own things is always badass.
Brought around by wanting to provide a 10-minute training to servers at bars and pubs carrying Pete’s Wicked Ale, Pete created a generic “leave behind” that he used to teach servers and bartenders about beer. After he explained how to read the thing, I was very impressed with the level of thought and design that went into this piece of collateral. As a beer judge, this training material may seem a little too simplified a little too general. But from the viewpoint of a server or bartender, this is exactly what they would need to sell craft beer. The graphic designer in me marvels at the simplicity of the piece. There’s always room for improvement or addition of details but for the audience this was designed for, this is right up their alley.
Basically, here’s how the chart breaks down. Beer is the major category that is broken down into ales and lagers. Ales are fermented at a warmer temperature and have more fruit character while lagers are fermented cooler and are cleaner in flavor. This forms a horizontal axis. Supplementing the horizontal axis is color. Color has no effect on flavor whatsoever but to give a visual indicator of what to expect. Since ales and lagers share the same beer color spectrum, a major flavor characteristic has been assigned to each color to help simplify their descriptions. Gold=cracker-like, amber=nutty, brown=roasty while black=burnt. Beer, both lagers and ales, tend to lean on either the sweet or bitter side. This forms a vertical axis with sweet on one end and bitter on the other. Based upon this system, you could plot where a particular beer is on the beer spectrum and easily describe its flavor to a customer. What even more badass is that you would be able to describe a beer in relation to other beers. This is paramount when attempting to sell a craft beer to someone unfamiliar with craft beers. Just pick a beer they do like, plot it on the system and see where it stands against other plotted craft beers. Pick craft beers closest to the beer your customer normally drinks to ease them into craft beers. Brilliant!
Pete did a similar chart for chocolate but I’m not going into that one. I am blown away by how much this man knows and I can see why he is still revered in the craft beer industry.
Later on after work, I headed over to Wine Affairs for some beer. Diane, the owner, invited me to join their staff training Monday night as they tasted the new winter beers they would be serving on bottle. It seems counterintuitive to be going to a wine bar for beers but what can I say? I like their beer selection. Here is a list of their winter beers with my usual crap notes:
Erdinger Hefeweizen, 5.3% ABV - This is an odd choice for a winter beer. In fact, it’s not very “wintery” at all. It’s characteristically effervescent with banana, clove and wheat malt flavors in nearly equal parts. Despite the range of flavors, it is a clean and easy to drink wheat beer.
St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout, 5% ABV - Brewed in Quebec, Canada. Despite it’s average ABV content, this beer has a perfumey, alcohol-like initial aroma. Per the style, I pick up deep roast aroma supported by chocolate and coffee notes. While these characteristics are echoed in the flavor, I also pick up some molasses-like flavors. This beer is medium bodied with medium carbonation. Despite the addition of oatmeal, I felt that this beer was lighter in body than I expected.
Meantime Porter, 6.5% ABV - Lots of coffee notes in both the aroma and flavor, very French roast. In addition, there’s a slight astringency that gives this beer a woodsy note. I can also pick up smoke in the aroma and flavor as well. There are slight nutty and chocolate notes as well. The beer is medium bodied with medium carbonation. It is clear, dark brown in color. Very English in nature, this is a restrainedly flavorful beer.
Allagash Black, 7.5% ABV - What an interesting beer. All the typical stout characteristics are in this beer: dark brown, nearing black in color, deep roast flavors and aromas with hints of coffee and chocolate, full body with medium/medium-high carbonation. Yet, there’s a notable Belgian yeast character to this beer as well with a distinct phenolic quality that is spicy and peppery. They used a Belgian yeast strain to ferment the beers and each beer is bottle fermented. I would recommend this beer for adventurous drinkers.
Jewbelation 12, 12% ABV - Even as a special anniversary beer, this beer is huge in many ways. Made with 12 malts, 12 hops and clocking in at 12% ABV, this beer is big. BIG. Jewbelation 12 has a complex and sophisticated malt profile. The aroma is sticky and sweet smelling like treacle, with a roasted and slightly toasted malt character supported by dark fruit esters like raisins and dates. The flavor is just as complex and echoes the aroma. This beer is full bodied, viscous with low/medium-low carbonation with notable alcohol character in the aroma and flavor. It is warm but not harsch. Despite its sweetness, this beer has an equal amount of hop flavor and bitterness that is lasting, yet secondary to the malt character. This is a very hard beer to get and Wine Affairs has it in stock currently. The wine people couldn’t stomach this beer, too big for them so I got to kill what was left in the bottle. Definitely a beer I would recommend, hell, buy a bottle to age as well. A sipping beer and definitely one to share with friends.- Scaldis Noël, 12% ABV - I already reviewed this beer here but I suppose I could at least contrast it with the Jewbelation 12. Despite having a similar ABV, these two beers couldn’t be any more different. Whereas the Jewbelation 12 is big in almost every way, the Noel is softer, more well rounded and surprisingly easy to drink. The alcohol character smooth and less noticeable than in the Jewbelation 12. The Noel has complexity in flavors that I find excitedly appealing, every sip reveals something different and I find myself smelling and tasting this beer in an attempt to determine what those aromas and flavors are. By contrast the Jewbelation hits you on the head with it’s aromas and flavors and leaves little to discovery. In the end, both are great beers but I would choose the Noel over the Jewbelation 12. Blasphemy to some, you can pimp Jewbelation 12 on your own blogs.
After the tasting, I had another opportunity to talk with Diane. She is a wealth of information with regards to wine and while she isn’t as well versed as myself in the details of beer her palette is much better and her way of describing things more eloquent. The winter beer season is upon Wine Affairs and they do have some notable beers on bottle, particularly the hard-to-find Jewbelation 12 and Scaldis Noel. I would pay them a visit while they still have them in stock.
