For Atlantic Cities
By David Lepeska
Perhaps no American city has embraced beer in recent years as heartily as Chicago. Places like Portland and San Diego have well-deserved reputations as craft brewing hotspots, but the Windy City – home to a pack of upstarts, several established players and two of the country's premier institutions of beer knowledge – seems well on its way to replacing its northern neighbor, home of baseball's Brewers, as the mecca of American beer.
“The trend in Chicago mirrors larger national trends in craft beer, but 2012 will be a banner year particularly for Chicago,” says Paul Schneider, who writes about the city's craft beer scene at chitownontap.com. “We are primed for absolutely unprecedented growth in volume, dollars, breweries, and SKUs.”
The city's biggest beer producer is of course MillerCoors, America’s second largest brewer, which opened its new headquarters downtown a few years ago. But it's the craft beer scene that's got the most depth these days:
-- The local leader is Goose Island. Launched by John Hall in 1988 as a brewpub on the city's North Side, it's now the 18th biggest U.S. brewer and was recently purchased by Anheuser-Busch. Goose Island's beers are sold across the U.S. as well as in the U.K. and Sweden. Its ales win major awards seemingly every year, and its limited-run specialty brews – such as Bourbon County Coffee Stout, which is brewed with beans from Intelligentsia coffee – usually sell out in minutes.
-- Jason Ebel and his brother Jim founded the other elder statesman among Chicago's craft brewers, Two Brothers, in suburban Warrenville, Illinois, in 1996. The company continues to expand – opening its second brewpub, in a 150-year-old, 70,000 square-foot roundhouse, last year – and its award-winning Domaine DuPage and Bitter End brews are sold across the Midwest and in New York.
-- Half Acre Beer began production in 2006, but gained a much higher profile after opening its Lincoln Square brewery and tasting room and launching its Daisy Cutter Pale Ale a few years later. After facing frequent shortages due to high demand, Half Acre is expanding to boost production by a third.
-- Revolution Brewing opened a brewpub in Logan Square in late 2009 and is now building a stand-alone production facility, with cans expected to reach area shelves by May or June.
-- Flossmoor Station, in the suburb of Flossmoor, has been named the best small brewpub brewer in America by the Great American Beer Festival.
-- Then there's Three Floyd's. Every year on the late April day it releases its Russian imperial stout, Dark Lord, some 6,000 beer lovers from across the world descend on the tiny burg of Munster, Indiana, and transform the Three Floyd's brewery and pub into a pilgrimage destination just to claim a few bottles of the black brew.
“Pretty much every local brewery is operating at capacity and trying to find ways to get more beer to market,” says Schneider. “They can't make it fast enough.”
And it's only the beginning. Schneider's 2012 craft beer preview lists nearly two-dozen Chicago area brewers in various planning stages.
Several are embracing innovation. The New Chicago Beer Company has partnered with The Plant, a sustainable food production facility on the South Side. Samuel Evans, who owns New Chicago Beer with his brother Jesse, is looking forward to fueling his brewery with steam from The Plant's $2 million anaerobic digester.*
“It makes perfect sense for a brewery because we create a lot of organic byproducts and use a ton of energy,” says Evans. “Other breweries have to cart away their spent grain, we just wheel it down the hallway and put it in the digester.” (Magic Hat Brewing, in Vermont, uses a similar digester.)
Argyle Brewing is creating what may be the first community-supported brewery. The Ravenswood outfit will support itself with subscriptions from members, who will in turn receive their monthly supply of brews.
Other new brewers include Broad Shoulders Brewing, founded by a former Goose Island brewer, and Pipeworks Brewing, which recently began production in its Wicker Park location after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
So why is this happening in Chicago? Chalk at least some of it up to institutional memory. Across the street from Goose Island's original brewpub on Clybourn Avenue sits the Siebel Institute of Technology, founded in 1871 and the oldest brewing school in the United States.
Scions of the Stroh's and Busch families learned the brewing arts at Siebel nearly a century ago. Today, scores of 21st century brewers-to-be come looking to gain insight on the finer points of hops and brewing styles. Siebel offers classes in Chicago, Milwaukee, Denver, and at its sister campus in Munich, Germany.
Chicago is also home to the Craft Beer Institute, which trains beer servers, distributors and restaurant and industry professionals in the history, production, handling, and consumption of beer. The program recently issued its 10,000 certified beer server certificate, just four years after Chicagoan Ray Daniels created the program.
With established players like Goose Island, up-and-comers like Half Acre and a wave of newcomers, new entrants to Chicago's craft beer scene might worry about the competition. Not so.
“We're not worried in the slightest,” says Samuel Evans of New Chicago Beer. “We're actually friends with the majority of these new breweries, and we all have our own niche we're going after. Craft beer's a very interesting industry, it's very open. There's countless collaborations between breweries. When one brewery struggles, others come in and help them out. It's just a culture that's been created around this young growing industry.”
Chicago's craft brewers are developing a culture of collaboration and cooperation just as millions of Chicagoans are learning to appreciate a fine brew. “The craft beer scene is definitely going to be a prominent feather in Chicago's cap,” says Schneider.
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Ran February 2012:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/02/chicagos-booming-beer-scene-explained/1356/
Showing posts with label Siebel Institute. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Siebel Institute. Show all posts
2.21.2011
A Quest to Add Sophistication to Beer's Appeal
By David Lepeska
nytimes.com
Like soaring architecture, wily crooks and hard-hitting sports, a good beer is something Chicagoans love. Ray Daniels has gone one further: He wants to know exactly what makes a good beer good and use that knowledge to improve the beer-drinking experience.
Mr. Daniels, 53, is on a quest to set up universal standards with the goal of instilling a greater respect for the taste and dining possibilities of beer. His effort has earned raves from brewers, critics and chefs.
“Trying to set some standards for beer sommeliers is a wonderful thing for enhancing the reputation of beer in fine dining and in America in general,” Karen Page, the James Beard Award-winning co-author of “What to Drink With What You Eat,” said of Mr. Daniels’s work. “Beer’s definitely being taken more seriously.”
Since falling in love with craft beers in the 1980s, Mr. Daniels has studied beer-making at the century-old Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago; worked as an editor for the Brewers Association, the country’s largest beer trade group; and wrote several books on brewing, including the highly regarded “Designing Great Beers” (Brewers Publications, 2000).
As he watched the production and popularity of artisanal microbrews grow over the past decade, Mr. Daniels noticed that most bars were simply adding new draft beers to their offerings with little concern for presentation or taste. Seeking “a better-tasting beer and a better beer experience,” he devised standards for beer knowledge and presentation. In January 2008, he began offering certification exams.
Today, his organization, the Craft Beer Institute, offers three different tests: certified beer server, certified cicerone and master cicerone, in ascending level of difficulty. Mr. Daniels wants to make a cicerone — literally, a guide for sightseers — the beer equivalent of a sommelier. The certified beer server exam costs $69 and can be taken online (at cicerone.org). The certified cicerone exam costs $345 and focuses on the history, production, serving, styles and tastes of beer from around the world.
“He is one of the most credible people in the beer industry,” said Julia Herz, head of craft beer at the Breweries Association, which represents craft brewers. “He’s the perfect one to spearhead this.”
Test takers might be asked to name a Belgian-style ale flavored with Curaçao, orange peel and grains of paradise, or to describe a salad and a beer that make a good pairing and the specifics of why they work together.
Though Mr. Daniels is trying to equate his certifications with those for wine, he is put off by stuffiness.
“In the wine world, people get all snobby about their knowledge,” said Mr. Daniels, who lives on the North Side. “We’re trying to avoid that. I want the cicerones to be guides, not gods.”
About 3,500 people have passed the beer server exam, and 200 have become certified cicerones, Mr. Daniels said. Small brewers like Sierra Nevada and Lagunitas support his program; Samuel Adams weaves cicerone standards into its internal sales training.
More than a dozen restaurants and pubs in the Chicago area have a cicerone-certified bartender or manager on staff, including the Bristol, a chic bistro in the trendy Bucktown neighborhood.
On a recent Friday there, Erin Phillips, the front-of-house manager, recommended the braised pig tail and a Belgian-style brown ale to a customer looking for a hearty food-beer pairing.
“The Rochefort 8 would stand up to the richness of the sauce and pull down the spiciness of the pork broth,” said Ms. Phillips, who is cicerone-certified. “And there’s a lot of earthy notes to the beer that I think would play off the pickled mustard greens as well.”
Chris Pandel, the Bristol’s executive chef who was named Rising Chef of the Year in the 2010 Jean Banchet Awards, Chicago’s highest culinary honors, said he appreciated Ms. Phillips’s knowledge.
“Her ability to take the nuances of what a beer could do and pair it with food, as you’d do with wine, is outstanding,“ he said.
The Bristol offers about 60 beers and the same number of wines, and Mr. Pandel thinks the two deserve equal billing.
“They really have the same purpose in the meal,” he said. “Beer’s not just for guzzling anymore.”
-------
Originally appeared in Feb 20, 2011, New York Times, www.nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Like soaring architecture, wily crooks and hard-hitting sports, a good beer is something Chicagoans love. Ray Daniels has gone one further: He wants to know exactly what makes a good beer good and use that knowledge to improve the beer-drinking experience.
Mr. Daniels, 53, is on a quest to set up universal standards with the goal of instilling a greater respect for the taste and dining possibilities of beer. His effort has earned raves from brewers, critics and chefs.
“Trying to set some standards for beer sommeliers is a wonderful thing for enhancing the reputation of beer in fine dining and in America in general,” Karen Page, the James Beard Award-winning co-author of “What to Drink With What You Eat,” said of Mr. Daniels’s work. “Beer’s definitely being taken more seriously.”
Since falling in love with craft beers in the 1980s, Mr. Daniels has studied beer-making at the century-old Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago; worked as an editor for the Brewers Association, the country’s largest beer trade group; and wrote several books on brewing, including the highly regarded “Designing Great Beers” (Brewers Publications, 2000).
As he watched the production and popularity of artisanal microbrews grow over the past decade, Mr. Daniels noticed that most bars were simply adding new draft beers to their offerings with little concern for presentation or taste. Seeking “a better-tasting beer and a better beer experience,” he devised standards for beer knowledge and presentation. In January 2008, he began offering certification exams.
Today, his organization, the Craft Beer Institute, offers three different tests: certified beer server, certified cicerone and master cicerone, in ascending level of difficulty. Mr. Daniels wants to make a cicerone — literally, a guide for sightseers — the beer equivalent of a sommelier. The certified beer server exam costs $69 and can be taken online (at cicerone.org). The certified cicerone exam costs $345 and focuses on the history, production, serving, styles and tastes of beer from around the world.
“He is one of the most credible people in the beer industry,” said Julia Herz, head of craft beer at the Breweries Association, which represents craft brewers. “He’s the perfect one to spearhead this.”
Test takers might be asked to name a Belgian-style ale flavored with Curaçao, orange peel and grains of paradise, or to describe a salad and a beer that make a good pairing and the specifics of why they work together.
Though Mr. Daniels is trying to equate his certifications with those for wine, he is put off by stuffiness.
“In the wine world, people get all snobby about their knowledge,” said Mr. Daniels, who lives on the North Side. “We’re trying to avoid that. I want the cicerones to be guides, not gods.”
About 3,500 people have passed the beer server exam, and 200 have become certified cicerones, Mr. Daniels said. Small brewers like Sierra Nevada and Lagunitas support his program; Samuel Adams weaves cicerone standards into its internal sales training.
More than a dozen restaurants and pubs in the Chicago area have a cicerone-certified bartender or manager on staff, including the Bristol, a chic bistro in the trendy Bucktown neighborhood.
On a recent Friday there, Erin Phillips, the front-of-house manager, recommended the braised pig tail and a Belgian-style brown ale to a customer looking for a hearty food-beer pairing.
“The Rochefort 8 would stand up to the richness of the sauce and pull down the spiciness of the pork broth,” said Ms. Phillips, who is cicerone-certified. “And there’s a lot of earthy notes to the beer that I think would play off the pickled mustard greens as well.”
Chris Pandel, the Bristol’s executive chef who was named Rising Chef of the Year in the 2010 Jean Banchet Awards, Chicago’s highest culinary honors, said he appreciated Ms. Phillips’s knowledge.
“Her ability to take the nuances of what a beer could do and pair it with food, as you’d do with wine, is outstanding,“ he said.
The Bristol offers about 60 beers and the same number of wines, and Mr. Pandel thinks the two deserve equal billing.
“They really have the same purpose in the meal,” he said. “Beer’s not just for guzzling anymore.”
-------
Originally appeared in Feb 20, 2011, New York Times, www.nytimes.com
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