Massachusetts Brewers Go Mild

If you've paid attention to the world of beer festivals lately, you've probably noticed something rather remarkable. Every year new events continue to appear, vying for the attention of excitable beer drinkers eager to sample the Next Big Thing. Large, small, well known or obscure, there are Oktoberfests, harvest festivals, Belgian fests, and celebrations for nearly every style under the sun, from mild mannered session ales to big, bad barleywines. At times, it almost feels like there are as many festivals as there are breweries, a reality that poses a challenge for organizers: How do you convince people to attend?

One way to do it is to offer a collaboration beer made exclusively for the occasion. There are precedents. For their fourth annual gathering, the Massachusetts Brewers Guild will offer a limited release cask English Mild created at Mayflower Brewing Company earlier this month. Many of the guild's 40 members participated in this collaboration, including Battle Road, Cambridge Brewing, Harpoon, Ipswich Brewing, Mayflower, Samuel Adams, Watch City, Wormtown, and Portico. The difference in this case however, is that the ale will serve as a base beer to which each participating brewery will add their own twist, be it maple syrup, oak chips, a favorite hop variety, or another ingredient that plays well with the style's light flavor and body.

Tickets for the event, scheduled for Friday, August 30th at Boston's World Trade Center Head House Concourse, are still available. The $40 price of admission includes beer samples from more than 30 member breweries, and proceeds benefit the guild, a non-profit organization established to promote and protect the interests of craft brewers across the state. Three Day Threshold, a local country group that also provided music for the Discovery Channel's short-lived "Brew Masters" series, will once again supply the live soundtrack, and casual dining options from the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center will be available for purchase. For a preview of many of the featured beers and breweries (including newcomers Riverwalk, 3 Beards, Banner Beer, Battle Road, Brewmaster Jack, and Kretschmann), visit BrewGene. As for the nine or so takes on the English Mild, you'll just have to get tickets to find out what they are, won't you? 

Beer Travel Talk at the New York Travel Festival

On Saturday, April 20th, I'll be moderating a panel discussion on beer travel at the inaugural New York Travel Festival (NYTF). Covering recent trends, brewery tours, and ale trails in New York and New Jersey, my session is one of dozens taking place at the Bohemian National Hall on East 73rd Street and will run from 11:20am until noon, with a beer tasting to follow. Panelists include: 

• Josh Bernstein, author of Brewed Awakening and the app Craft Beer New York
• Jeremy Cowan, founder of Schmaltz Brewing (NY) and president of the New York City Brewers Guild
• Gene Muller, founder of Flying Fish Brewing (NJ) and vice president of the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild
• David Naczycz, co-founder of Urban Oyster

Join us in the first floor cinema and bring questions! Then stick around to sample several beers, including Hop Manna IPA. Single day and package tickets (which include lunch and a Sunday tour) are still available: bitly.com/NYTF2013.

Cider Culture Reborn in Frankfurt

To most people, Frankfurt is known as a center of business and banking. Rarely is this city on the Main River thought of as a place with a distinctive beer culture. Yet Germany’s “Mainhattan” as it is referred to on occasion, doesn’t lack for a culinary history of its own. Nor does it try to rival the nation’s great capitals of brewing: Bamberg, Munich, and Köln. Instead, the Frankfurt region simply devotes itself to cider, a beverage its residents call apfelwein, äbbelwoi, or stöffche in the local dialect.

Mentioned in the eighth century Capitulare de Villis and known to be a popular drink since the time of Charlemagne, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the first apple wine taverns began to appear, advertising their blends of this low-alcohol beverage by displaying a green wreath outside. Entrepreneurs like Wilheim Höhl and Philipp Possmann eventually capitalized on the popularity of apfelwein, expanded to meet a growing demand, and are now two of the biggest producers in the country. In the last decade though, a number of smaller artisanal cidermakers have emerged, aspiring to reconnect with the region’s agricultural heritage by working with native apple varieties such as Bohnapfel, Anhalter, and Winterrambour.

“Cider is culture,” Andreas Schneider told me during a visit last summer. “We are now growing more than 70 varieties of apples and more than 25 varieties of pears.” About eight miles north of Frankfurt—close enough to still see the skyline—Schneider concentrates on nurturing the orchard his parents planted in Nieder-Erlenbach in 1965. Today he’s the only cider maker in the immediate area that still grows, presses, and bottles his own fruits. Granted, his dry, single variety ciders lack the malted barley and Noble hops used in the beers brewed throughout Germany, but in other ways his cold fermented, small batch creations aren’t so different from the hand crafted ales and lagers found in German brewpubs and beer gardens.

Welsh Craft Cider

Last September I spent a week in Wales. It wasn't my first trip to this mountainous country, but in a very real sense I was seeing Wales anew. Because while I did spend a night in Cardiff and even managed a short hike in Brecon Beacons National Park, I missed many of the things that people travel here for: castles, museums, rugby, or in a few rare cases, bog snorkeling. Instead, the purpose of my visit was to drink cider.

Beginning in Swansea, I drove through the rain to the westernmost end of Pembrokeshire, across the Cambrian Mountains into Powys, and then back south again into the Valleys. Over the course of seven days I met craft cider makers and drinkers, along with a number of friendly Welsh bartenders and innkeepers. Somewhat unexpectedly, I also became a bit of a cider connoisseur myself. If you're curious about the drink and its origins, read about my trip in the current issue of DRAFT magazine or consider attending the world's first International Craft Cider Festival at Llancaiach Fawr Manor in August.

A Spring Cleaning

Two weeks ago I found myself running for my life. The day before, my friends and I had turned up in Sangkhlaburi, a sleepy little town near the Burmese border at the northern end of the Khao Laem Reservoir. Only we were arriving during the one time that the entire country of Thailand happens to be wide awake: the Thai New Year. Better known as Songkran, this famously boisterous holiday can trace many of its traditions back to the fourteenth century and the kingdom of Ramathibodi in Ayutthaya.

Flash forward to the present however, and I'm sprinting from a pack of heavily armed, Hawaiian shirt-wearing assailants in a futile attempt to stay dry. Because while Thais do observe the holiday in a variety of ways, the celebration today is defined by a prolonged, nationwide water fight. And I hadn't brought anything to defend myself with. Far from menacing, the kids in town nonetheless knew how to use their squirt guns and water buckets, and took great pleasure in drenching a conspicuous group of farang. View more pictures from the Songkran Festival in my Kanchanaburi photo set.