Beyond The Pale Ale

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“There
are about 26O million people in America,” B.United importer
Matthias Neidhart said with some candor, “and there are not
many of them who are interested in these styles – not many
percentage-wise. But even a small percentage of 26O million
people is quite a number. Over the past 25 years a palate
has been developed in America that appreciates this kind of
beer.” Neidhart formed B.United International for a
particular reason, and it wasn’t to simply import whatever
beers caught his fancy. “Pilsner probably accounts for 9O%
of the beer made worldwide, perhaps more,” he said. “But
it’s only one style. In our company, our mission has been to
bring to America the best examples of as many different beer
styles as possible. The pilsner style is not of interest to
us, of course, because other people take care of
that.”

When you ask Neidhart about
the truly odd beers he imports, he bridles. “They have
developed over centuries,” he protests. “Are they odd? No! I
would say, they are just different. We are very much
interested in them, as very similar to wine. There are so
many styles of red wine, white wine. There are tons of
different beer styles and categories. We don’t use pilsner
as a benchmark, they are all beers.”

Neidhart is not the only
importer with odd, excuse me, different beers. Alan Shapiro
of SBS Imports brings in Wild Ale from Belgium (along with
the also quite different Aspall Cyders). Patrick Casey at
Legends Ltd. imports a line of ales from Scotland brimful of
out of the ordinary ingredients.

There are also Americans
making different beers though not as many as you’d think.
For a brewing industry that’s known for its wide variety of
beer styles and innovation, American brewers are
surprisingly timid when it comes truly stepping out of
bounds. Oh, they’ll add odd ingredients, they’ll add tons of
hops, they’ll run the alcohol levels to new heights, but if
you’re looking for really out-there beers (that you’ll find
in New England) it really comes down to Heavyweight and
Dogfish Head.

Let’s take a look at the
different beers that these importers and brewers provide.
You may roll your eyes, you may step back in disgust or
confusion, but I guarantee you that there are people out
there who will not only be interested, they’ll be willing to
pay top dollar for them. Like Neidhart said, even a small
percentage of 26O million is a lot of people.

Much of the trick to
selling it to that small percentage is doing your homework.
As Patrick Casey says, “It’s important that the retailer
knows the story – half of selling it is the story. If they
hear the story, and they taste it, chances are high that
they’ll buy it again.” So pull up a chair, and let’s tell
some stories.

B.UNITED
INTERNATIONAL We’ll
start slow with B.United’s portfolio. Berliner Weisse, from
the Berliner Kindl brewery, is a beer most of your ‘upper
echelon’ customers will have heard of, because of coverage
in Michael Jackson’s books. I was lucky enough to drink this
beer and enjoy it greatly at a German specialty bar back in
the 198Os, but it has had a spotty presence in the US until
B.United started importing it regularly. It is low in
alcohol, highly carbonated and shockingly tart – a beer that
is intentionally inoculated with lactic acid-producing
bacteria. Berliner Weisse produces a pucker factor that will
draw your cheeks in so tight they meet in the middle, and
it’s a sourness that can be beautifully tamed with the
addition of a small amount of flavored syrup, as the
Berliners do it. “The Berliner Weisse was created in Berlin
in the mid-17OOs, perhaps earlier,” explained Neidhart. But
it was hardly unique at the time; sour was everywhere. “At
this point, pretty much every beer had some sourness to it.
Breweries were not 1OO% clean at this time, and so the same
was true for every style. All beers were once smoked beers
for similar reasons: all malt was dried over wooden fires.
But when the people in Bamberg, Bavaria, got the new, clean
malt, they said, ‘This is not beer as we know it.’ They were
very stubborn people who believed that this was how beer
should be, they liked it that way, and so they kept it. What
the Berlin brewers did was similar. This is the original
way, they said, and if you take it away, it’s a different
beer. They stuck it out.”

The story many beer lovers
know is that Berliner Weisse was dubbed the “champagne of
the North” by Napoleon’s soldiers. Neidhart tells the story
with a twist. “It became famous when Napoleon captured
Berlin,” he said. “When he entered Berlin, he ran into
Berliner Weisse immediately, and he loved it. It reminded
him of champagne. But it was too tart, so he started the
cult of adding syrup to it, raspberry or woodruff, which is
an herb that grows in the woods around Berlin.” If you sell
Berliner Weisse, it would be well worth your while to track
down a source of these syrups to sell alongside. Pour a
bottle in a goblet, add some cracked ice and a tablespoon of
syrup, and stir for a remarkably refreshing beer
concoction.

The next two beers from
B.United are quite different indeed. Leipziger Gise is a
sour beer brewed with coriander and salt, with a taste quite
unlike anything else. “Gise is a style created back, oh,
God,” Neidhart paused to think, and continued. “It was first
mentioned in 1OOO AD. More recently, it was commercially
brewed in the 17OOs, but not in Leipzig. It was brewed in a
tiny town in central Germany, called Goslar. The name is
similar to gueuze, but there is no historical record of a
connection. It sounds familiar, people think it has common
roots, but no one has proven it.

“The Goslar brewers added
coriander, salt and lactobacillus to their beer,” Neidhart
continued. “But that tiny town didn’t have much of a market,
so they went looking for markets in bigger towns, market
towns, to sell it in, and that led them to Leipzig,
historically a trade town. Many Leipzig brewpubs that opened
in the 18OOs brewed the gise. Then pilsner and lager were
discovered, and people loved those beers and completely
forgot the top-fermenting beers – not just the gise, but all
the others. Pilsner lager was a huge event in European
brewing, and pushed other beers to the side.” You get the
feeling that Neidhart is downright snarly about pilsner.
“Leipzig was in East Germany after World War II,” Neidhart
said, “and the Soviets spent no money on traditional
breweries. By the 196Os, no breweries were left in Leipzig
to brew the gise. When the Wall came down, western
entrepreneurs moved into the East. Thomas Schneider (no
relation to the Munich wheat beer brewers of the same name)
owned a wheat beer brewery in Bavaria. There is a beautiful
building, a train station, in Leipzig, the Bayerischer
Bahnhof, and he got interested in the history of the
building. Then he got interested in the gise beer, and
rented the building and established a brewery in the train
station. He is trying to recreate the beer as much as
possible from historical documents.”

Another ancient beer style
is sahti, a Finnish beer that Michael Jackson calls the
oldest primitive beer style to survive in Europe. Neidhart
is the first person to import it to America. “The sahti is
an amazing thing,” he said, “that really belongs to Finland.
It originated in the 15OOs. These older beers were based on
the availability of local spices and fruits, everything
happened in that environment. And in Finland there is tons
of juniper. Another thing you run into is the sauna, they
use the juniper twigs to freshen up the sauna. So it is not
really surprising that they used juniper in the
beer.”

The juniper is not actually
an ingredient in sahti, though. “The original sahti is not
boiled in a kettle,” said Neidhart. “The mash is a
combination of barley and rye malts, that goes right from
the mash tun to the fermentation tank, through the juniper
twigs. It is lautered (strained) over and through juniper
twigs. It gives a special flavor and aroma to the beer. It
must be kept cold, between 38Å¡ and 45Å¡F. If there is a boil
and preservative hops, a beer will keep, but this has
neither. It is very cloudy, turbid, and if it gets warm,
microorganisms will create reactions in the beer.” No boil,
no lauter tun and not even brewer’s yeast. “They didn’t have
beer yeast,” Neidhart explained, “so they have a special
Finnish baker’s yeast which imparts notes like a Bavarian
wheat beer – banana and clove notes. The resulting sahti is
quite strong, 8%, and in Finland it is a very special treat
on special occasions. We bring that in small quantities, in
temperature-controlled containers.”

The sahti has a very short
shelf-life, which will make it even more alluring to your
geekiest geeks: gotta get it now – if you don’t jump, it’s
ruined! If that’s a little too risky for you, or if you have
irregular visitors, don’t worry, Matthias has you covered.
“The brewery has developed a version they call Mahti,” he
said, “with the same malt combinations and juniper in the
mash tun. But instead of baker’s yeast, he uses ale yeast
and a tiny amount of hops, and boils it. It does not have
the banana clove flavors, but it does have a delicate
juniper flavor. Both have very low carbonation, very little
head.”

Neidhart’s other beers are
far from ordinary, and also deserve your attention, but he
does one more truly different beer: Wostyntje, a Belgian ale
brewed close to the French border. “It is a wonderful
creation of this tiny brewery, and a very creative brewer,”
said Neidhart. “Farmers in the area grow mustard seed, and
he always thought they might provide a good flavor and
aroma. It turns it into a very dry finish, and you know it
has some kind of spiciness, but if you didn’t know, you’d
never guess it was mustard. It follows the Belgian tradition
of using what’s available in the local area.”

LEGENDS,
LTD. Patrick Casey
is the President at Legends, Ltd., a company that brings in
beers from the British Isles. The ones we’re interested in
are from the Heather Ales company in Scotland, where brewer
Bruce Williams has created a line of beers which bring to
mind wild bagpipes playing over the glens and the heather.
“Bruce Williams sets the company apart,” Casey said. “He is
not only a first-class brewer, but believes that if it
doesn’t grow in Scotland, it doesn’t go in the bottle. He
likes to revive ancient styles.”

Luckily, plenty of barley
grows in Scotland, but there’s not much of a hop crop. So
Williams went into the country’s history to find a number of
beers flavored with other plants. Heather Ale, or Fraoch
(which Patrick Casey says is pronounced roughly like this:
“froo-ech”) was the first, and still the best known. “There
is some evidence that it goes back 2OOO years,” said Casey.
“The Picts brewed it from 3OO BC to 9OO AD, ’til they were
wiped out by the Vikings. They were the guys who ran in
around blue face (think Braveheart).”

Fraoch’s flavor is quite
different from other beers, and unfamiliar to most
Americans. “Bruce always makes fun of us,” Casey says. “He
says, ‘You Americans don’t understand subtle, you don’t know
‘hmmm, what was that taste, it’s just on the edge’. That’s
exactly what these beers are.”

Your geeks will probably be
familiar with Fraoch, it’s been out for a while. But
introduce them to the rest of the family! Grozet is a
recreation of a gooseberry and wheat ale described in
literature by Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns as light
pale ale with champagne. Ebulum is made with elderberries.
“Welsh druids brought it in the 9th Century,” said Casey.
“It’s interesting that in the old books, elderberries were
advised for many natural remedies for neuralgia, influenza,
sciatica.”

Alba is made with pine and
spruce shoots, picked in the spring. “The Vikings introduced
that to the area,” said Casey. “It’s a sweet but potent
beer. Captain Cook used spruce beer on long sea voyages, it
prevented scurvy. There are different spruces, and Shetland
Island spruce was said to ‘stimulate animal instincts’ and
give you twins.” Best be careful with that one! When
Williams first offered Casey a sample of Kelpie, a beer
flavored with seaweed, Casey didn’t react well. “I told him,
‘Get out, I don’t want that junk!’ but then I tasted it, and
it’s wonderful! It’s not made with kelp, though. The Loch
Ness monster is a kelpie, it’s a mythical sea creature.
About 4OO years ago, the coastal farmers used seaweed as
fertilizer to grow their cereal crops and it got into the
taste of the bread. Bruce puts it in the wort and in the
hopback.”

Quite a line of beers, and
after all, as Mike Myers used to say on Saturday Night Live,
“If it’s not Scottish, it’s crrrap!”

SBS Imports Alan Shapiro’s
SBS Imports is a company founded on a very small, select
portfolio. “It was designed for the jaded beer lover,” he
said with a chuckle. “I wanted a small portfolio, but built
so that something about everything in it could cut through
the clutter, on top of a high benchmark level of quality. I
thought that something different was necessary to start a
new company.”

He certainly found it in
the Wild Ale. Brewed by the Andelot Proefbrouwerij of
Belgium, Wild Ale is one of a kind. “The only beer that’s
even similar is Orval,” said Shapiro. “Both are fermented
three times with two yeasts, and both are dry-hopped.” Both
are also tinged with the dry, aromatic results of a
brettanomyces inoculation. But the similarities end there.
For one thing, Wild Ale is a very deceptive 9% ABV. “And on
the back end of the beer,” Shapiro (who is a self-admitted
huge fan of Orval) noted, “whereas Orval is a very bitter
beer, there’s kind of a juicy maltiness in the middle and
then a nice hop finish to the Wild Ale. To my taste
preference, I like a hint of that gueuze-type sourness, but
I don’t like to be blown away by it. I liked the beer so
much that I just kind of had to bring it in.”

Be forewarned: Wild Ale is
way out there. It’s no gimmick, but it is extreme, and some
people just don’t care for it. “There are clearly some
people who try it and find it just too strange,” said
Shapiro. “They can’t connect the dots. You can see that in
the reviews on the online beer rating sites. If you scan
through them, you see the differences in the consumers: ‘My
God, the most complex beer I’ve ever had;’ and ‘My God,
what’s wrong with this stuff, it must be spoiled!'” Choose
your geek carefully. “There’s a danger to introducing
Belgian beers to some customers with a beer like this,”
Shapiro admitted. “They can be turned off. That’s why I also
bring in the Reynard Amber, it’s a smoother introduction to
Belgian beer.”

HEAVYWEIGHT
BREWING I know
Heavyweight’s Tom Baker pretty well, and I know how he feels
about out of the ordinary beers – I brewed one with him.
Heavyweight’s Perkuno’s Hammer porter was the result of my
begging Tom to make a Baltic porter, a style that at the
time was scarcely known at all in America. He agreed, we
brewed up a batch (complete with a dose of beans and a
hard-to-find yeast strain), and were both shocked when it
was turned out to be quite popular. With geeks, that is –
none of Baker’s beers are what you’d call heavy hitters in
sales.

That’s certainly true of
Baker’s Two Druids. “It’s by far my worst-seller,” Tom
admitted, “but I’m stubborn.” Two Druids is a gruit, a
hop-less beer style. It’s spiced with herbs like sweet gale,
yarrow and wild rosemary. “It’s actually pretty
interesting,” Baker said. “The malt and yeast are what you’d
normally make a pale ale from, but those wacky herbs turn it
into a beer people really hate. People love it or despise
it. I don’t find people saying the Two Druids is so-so.” Why
herbs? Simple. “Hops, hops, hops!” Baker yelled. “I like
hops as much as most people, but a beer without hops
challenges peoples’ beliefs. I like making it. I don’t
really care anymore that it doesn’t have hops in it. Fed
regs say you can’t call it beer if it doesn’t have hops, but
I don’t care.” If that doesn’t challenge your geekiest
geeks, nothing will.

DOGFISH
HEAD I didn’t get
hold of Sam Calagione at Dogfish Head for this piece, but I
couldn’t ignore his beers. From the ridiculous (Liquor de
Malt, the bottle-conditioned (and delicious) malt liquor
made with three different heritage strains of corn) to the
sublime (Midas Touch, a beer brewed with grapes and spices
to archeological specs derived from the tomb of the original
King Midas), Dogfish Head is all about different
beer.

The most easily available
Dogfish Head beer that’s out of the ordinary is probably
Raison d’Etre, a beer brewed with two boils, one a smaller,
separate one that has an addition of Madagascar brown sugar,
Belgian beet sugar and green raisins. “For a brewery to have
a flagship that’s made with raisins and is 8% . . .”.
Calagione laughed in an earlier interview. “Well, I don’t
see A-B looking at it and saying, ‘Jesus, we better get in
that category!’ But it’s got to be a positive component to
the beer, not just a novelty. If I was saying ‘Hey, I
figured out how to put candy canes in our beers,’ we’d be
out of business. I get tired of tasting a beer with a ‘fifth
ingredient’, that’s either overwhelming, out of place or not
noticeable. It’s important that it works. We’ve been doing
variations of this for 8 years – we’ve got experience at
finding that level of balance that works.”

Sometimes that level of
balance is tenuous: the brewery’s summer seasonal is
Aprihop, an unlikely combination of a fairly hoppy IPA and
pureed dried apricots. Bizarre, even disgusting as it
sounds, the beer works quite well. As Calagione said,
they’ve got experience at this.

SELLING
IT How do you sell
these very different beers? First off, don’t be scared. “The
difference between 1994 and 2OO4 is remarkable,” said Casey.
“Places that didn’t even know what you’re talking about then
are selling these beers like crazy.” Shapiro was
enthusiastic about how interested people are. “To some
extent, it’s something like the craft beer biz was in its
initial trial phase in the 198Os,” he said. “People are
trying new styles for the first time. I think there’s a
tremendous trial of Belgians going on right now, and even
the connoisseur is anxious to see new labels and try new
breweries.”

You still have to select
your customer, and bring the beer to them. “It is a
hand-sell,” said Neidhart, “no question about it. If you
just put it on the list or on the shelf, people will not
pick it up. But retailers take pride in handselling. Develop
a customer base that is looking for the new and different.
Send out a newsletter telling them about it. And there’s a
lot of profit margin in these items – it’s not just beer
interest, it’s profit interest. It’s all about hand-selling,
and people at the store being interested in providing good
beers that are not widely available.” Shapiro agreed.
“Almost without fail, the stores that have succeeded the
best are the ‘wine steward’ stores who have someone near the
aisle who can hand-sell, or at the least, the stores that do
good shelf-talkers and tasting notes. If you have the space
to spotlight new and interesting selections, that’s a good
way to go. But tasting notes and information on the beer are
the key. This is not a product that’s been around for
hundreds of years – it’s new to people.” Sampling is a great
way to get people interested, and Casey has a sampler pack
for the Fraoch line. “He has a historic ale gift-pack – four
of the beers in a small box, a unique box, very detailed,”
he said. “It sells well for Christmas gifts. The beer geeks
want to buy anything that’s new. But a high percentage of
them stay with it, because they recognize a well-made beer.”
It is going to take some work. But these are your spendiest
customers, the ones who think nothing of dropping $15O on
two cases of special beers. They deserve some effort, and so
do these beers.

Come to think of it, so do
you and your store. As Neidhart said, “If all everyone
carried was Bud, Miller and Coors, how would you
differentiate yourself?” Try something different really
different.