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The traditional question at every NERAX festival is, “Where is the imported beer?”.  Well, the imported beer for NERAX at Novare Res, both German and British, is in Portland.

Weather of course will play a part this weekend, but everything looks great for the festival.  Part of my job is to worry about what might go wrong, but to be honest I’m down to worrying about details. HAH, this could be famous last words…

We have no idea how popular this event will be. We know the cask ales will be great, but how will Portland respond?  We’ll see. Novare Res is ready…

I just caught wind of this report from Charlie Papazian. Severe thunderstorms and hail ravaged Europe earlier this week, and the Hallertauer area, famous for its Hallertauer Hallertau hops, was severely damaged. For lovers of many traditional German beer styles, this is not good news.

One [Brewers Association] member from the Netherlands reports, “Staff of Bayerische Staatsbrauerei Weihenstephaner [where the German brewing school resides], who live throughout the area, have all reported the complete destruction of hop fields in the region.” Other reports indicate that the damage was local in some areas and effected about only 25% of the region.

Also effected are several Sam Adams beers, including their flagship Boston Lager. According to Papazian’s article, it can take up to two years for a newly planted hop vine to yield a full harvest, so production may be effected for a couple years. Other Hallertau growing regions around the world may be able to fill some of the demand, but while their bitterness is similar, varieties grown elsewhere tend to have a floral note that Hallertauer-grown hops lack.

Let’s hope that the damage is not too widespread, especially if you homebrew with Hallertauer-grown hops. I have to imagine that Jim Koch would be able to get his hands on hops before your local homebrew shop would.

Small Beers are a style of beer rarely seen these days. NERAX is fortunate to have not one but two of these cask ales on offer this year. Small Beers are the product of a brewing technique that dates back to medieval times, parti-gyle brewing.

In an article in Brewing Techniques magazine Randy Mosher said this about parti-gyle brewing:

“One technique that has almost disappeared from modern practice is parti-gyle brewing. This technique involved drawing off the first part of the mash and using it to make strong ale or barley wine, then remashing the grain and drawing off the second runnings for a more ordinary, weak and watery concoction called small beer, the light beer of its day.

The fabrication possibilities of the time made it relatively easy to construct large wooden mash tuns, but the technology required to construct equally large kettles had yet to be developed. Consequently, English ale breweries often made three brews from a single mash – strong (XXX), common (XX) and small (X) beer. In fact, this is the historical basis of the categories of Belgian Trappist beers: triple was made from the undiluted wort from the mash, double was made from the runoff from reflooding the first mash, and single was made from a subsequent infusion.”

The first of our beers is from the John Harvard brewpub in Connecticut, and the second is from our very own Marshall Wharf Brewing Company in Belfast.

The folks at Marshall Wharf initially set out to make a Barley Wine. That beer reportedly finished off in the 12% range. We’re not getting that beer at NERAX, but I’m sure looking forward to trying it somewhere here in Maine. The small beer, Little Toot, was a natural part of the Barley Wine project. It’s not finished yet, but it seems to be headed for a range of 4.1%-4.5%  This one on cask should be a lot of fun.

Oakham’s Attila from Cambridgeshire has been selected Champion Beer of Britain. This is a 7.5% Barley Wine described by the brewery as having “fruity notes and an elderberry aroma, with the taste of ripe red berries and citrus fruit and a long bitter fruity finish”. It tasted wonderful, and I’d hardly argue with that description.

Here’s how it was selected… I got recruited to serve beers at the tasting so got to see the process for the first time.

The Winter Festival tastes beers in four categories: Old Ales and Strong Milds, Stouts, Porters, and Barley Wines. There were five or six beers in each category; each beer had won a tasting at a local festival.

The judging panels for each category consisted of five people selected by the competition organizer. The leader of each tasting panel was an experienced beer taster. The rest of the panel contained a mix of brewers, pub owners, and novice tasters – there was a real effort to get a cross-section of experience. Each taster received a packet of material beforehand describing the attributes and expectations for their category of beer. The objective is to judge how well each beer expresses the style, not just whether a taster ‘likes the beer’.

There are five bars at the Winter Festival. One of the bars contains only the beers in competition for the champion beer.

The tasters meet at a round table in an isolated room, and have a scoring sheet with columns for each coded beer, with space for four considerations: appearance, aroma, taste and after-taste. They code each 1-10. The scoring weights taste heavier than the other three considerations. The leader calls for beers one at a time. The serving people (my colleague and I served for the Stout tasting team) then take their trays to the champion beer bar and collect coded glasses with samples of the first beer. This process continues until all six beers are tasted. During the scoring discussion among the tasters is encouraged.

The logistics for all this is impressive. Including requests for re-tastes, we handled over 100 glasses of beer, and to my knowledge none got mixed up…

Competions like this are a big deal to British brewers, with significant commercial impact. The festival trade session followed the announcement of the results, and trade discussion of the judging and results was pretty intense.