Brewed Beverage of Choice: A Goblet of Rose City Til I DiePA (This was Saturday afternoon…now I am drinking coffee…)
I was sitting at a pub Saturday fulfilling one of my shameless self promotion goals when the property manager for my pub came over to me and told me that I had to go and convince a patron to vote for my Rose City Til I DiePA (RCTIDPA) over another beer in the competition. Normally I do not like doing something like talking up my beers. If it was good enough, it would stand out on its own. But that philosophy is only so good, so I walked over to the booth and started to stump for the RCTIDPA.
There were many ways for me to attack this problem. I could tell him to just buy pints of each make the decision side by side, which I did actually do. Then I could play on the “More Is Better” philosophy that permeates in this culture and tell him that my beer is actually 9.5% Alcohol by Volume and not 8.6% as stated in the program. But it finally hit me as I was speaking to him. I should play up the “Less Is Better” angle of the RCTIDPA.
Of course this topic has been rummaging around in my head for a week or so when I was having two very similar conversations. The first involving a renewed interest in English Mild Ales and Brown ales. These two beers are usually lower in alcohol and, subseqently, in the case of the Mild, are finding it hard to break into the American beer culture. The other conversation involved an article on the farmhouse beers of the Franconia region of Germany. In it, Dan Shelton, a beer importer stated the following:
“When American beer drinkers spend more money on a beer they want more alcohol. It’s a real challenge to sell something that’s not rare in its homeland but that costs a lot to get in. People need to get used to paying for character.”
So how does this relate to the RCTIDPA, which as stated is over 9.5% ABV? Well, the Rose City utilizes one of the most underappreciated factors in brewing: the longer boil time. It is more common on the Continent to use fewer types of grain and getting colour from the longer boil. For whatever reason, brewers in the states inevitably try to throw everything plus the kitchen sink into their brews when it comes to hops and grain. The more the better. I find this tactic to sometimes make the final product a bit overwhelming and “glamourous.” That is glamour for the sake of glamour. Pretty on the outside.
The Rose City only has one type of grain: a local organic pilsener malt. It is practically the lightest malt on the market and if boiled for 60 minutes to 90 minutes, makes a beautiful straw colour. Straw being the colour of a pilsener or some American IPAs. But the Rose City was boiled for two hours and has a pleasant medium orange hue. The two hour boil causes caramelization in the beer, hence the flavour profile is a bit different than if only boiled for a shorter period of time. This caramelization adds a different bit of flavour than if I had used a Crystal or Caramel malt for colour and flavour. When you look at the RCTIDPA in a glass it is remarkable that one type of malt made that colour. See for yourself.
So this is what I had to impress on the voter. The Rose City Til I DiePA packs all that flavour and colour from one type of grain and 4 types of hops. The other beer had as many as 4 grains and 4 hops. The RCTIDPA received more from less. So in a long winded conversation basically it boiled down to “Less Is Better.” I went back several times to talk to this group of gentlemen, but when they were about to tell me who they voted for, I stopped them. There are some things better left unsaid. Same philosophy…
Prost!
the confucian brewer