On the House

New Beerdrinker of the Year Crowned

Let it be shouted from the rooftops: Diane Catanzaro from Norfolk, Virginia, is the 2007 Beerdrinker of the Year!

What’s that? You say you didn’t even know there was such a crown? Well, frankly, welcome to the crowd.

Although it’s hardly well celebrated, or even widely recognized, the Beerdrinker of the Year, or BDOY, contest has been run by the Denver, Colorado-based Wynkoop Brewing Company brewpub for eleven years. During that span, men and women from across the country have vied for the title, first by submitting “beer resumes,” which include their experience in beer travel and advocacy, and a statement of their personal “beer philosophy.” The entries are then vetted and three finalists invited to Denver for the final competition.

Although mostly done tongue in cheek – judges wear full wigs and gowns and competitions include such segments as “beer whispering” – the contest also places demands on the finalists’ understanding of beer style, complexity, chemistry and history. As Catanzaro stated after being crowned, “Beer is not just some fizzy yellow drink. It has a rich history, an incredible array of styles and flavors, and it’s part of a healthy life style.”

Sound sentiment from the new Beerdrinker of the Year.

Diana Catanzaro is flanked by (l to r) judges Tom Ciccateri (2005 winner), Tom Dalldorf (Celebrator Beer News), Gary Steinel (2003 winner) and Carolyn Smagalski (aka The Beer Fox at Bellaonline.com).

Walkin' Thru New Orleans

Recently, thanks to the 10th Annual Cheers Beverage Conference, I had the pleasure of visiting a dear old friend, one who has shared no end of good times with me, fed me well, plied me with festive libations and danced with me ‘til dawn. I love this old friend, but she’s had a bit of a tough go lately.

Seems she fell on hard times about a year and a half ago and there hasn’t been a whole lot of love or support sent her way by the one entity who could truly help. Frankly, in many areas of the Lovely Crescent, she has been ill served and abandoned. It’s appalling and unacceptable and reprehensible.

But you wouldn’t know it to look at it on the surface. New Orleans seems, to the tourist eye, to be much the same as it ever was. The drive in from the airport to the French Quarter leaves the impression that everything is back to normal...you can’t see any flood damage, restaurants are open, shops are back in swing, the street musicians are singing and Café du Monde is cranking out the café au lait and beignets.

But talk to the people and you hear a deeper story... homes that remain rubble, families scattered, no one to build even if you HAVE the money, restaurants and hotels that never reopened because there’s no labor pool to staff them, shops and art galleries struggling to stay open...they pull out their pictures and show you what once was...beautiful, tree-lined streets, family heirlooms and pictures of ancestors... homes that were bought with the money scraped together from countless menial jobs, faces of the departed, lives that have been irreparably changed.

But here’s the thing...they are smiling and upbeat and clearly glad you are there in their beloved town. They laugh and joke around and act as if they didn’t have their lives ripped out from under them by the waters.

Like Wilhelmina at the Coffee Pot Café, right next to Pat O’Briens. We were planning on going to Pat O’B’s when, finding it closed for lunch that day, we went right next door to the Coffee Pot for a late breakfast. It was kind of a coolish day, but to Northern Californians, it was perfect, so we asked to sit outside. Wilhelmina looked at us as if all the sense God gave a goat had fled us and proceeded to tell us we were welcome to sit outside, since we had clearly lost our minds, but she wasn’t having any of it. And if we insisted, poor befuddled morons that we were, we were to eat what she told us to eat and that we were to say ‘Yes M’am’ and nothing else. OK, she’d get us our pre-noon cocktails- Milk Punch, Hurricane and Bloody Mary- twice- but if we thought we were gonna get it any time soon, we were mistaken. Sit down, shut up and eat what I give you.

We never laughed so hard in our lives. And were drunk by 11:30am. And threw money at her.

Or Yassir, at the Pelican Club. After an amazing dinner, all courses suggested and recommended by adorable little Yassir, plus a couple of bottles of great Austrian wine he suggested, we got up to leave. Yassir had been off the floor at that time, but as we started to leave, we hear from across the room a plaintive...’What, no good-bye??’...whereupon we three rushed back for a group hug.

Or Valena at the Acme Oyster House, who insisted she would remember our order in her head, only to come back sheepishly with a funny little sidling dance to tell us she had apparently lost her mind and forgotten our order the minute she turned around...then ‘pinched’ a boiled crawfish app to get us started.

Or Ashton at Nola, who, along with his team, made our birthday dinner special...we are all February babies....or the countless servers and bartenders we interacted with, each and every one the picture of optimism and cheer.

Or the other locals we met... a society lady who approached us as we walked down Bourbon to ask if she could walk with us...giving us the impression she felt safer in a group (though we did not have a single cause to feel unsafe the entire week we were there)...we walked her to her home, several blocks past our condo...she invited us, perfect strangers, into her home and told us of how she was haunted by the images she can’t forget...

Or the ‘right hand’ of a local restaurant scion, who shared her story of having to let workers sleep in her attic in exchange for repair work on her home...she needed the work, they needed a roof over their heads, Katrina making strange bedfellows...

But they all had the same thing to say and we heard it over and over:

“Thank you so much for coming back to New Orleans...please go home and tell your friends that we’re here, we’re still standing and we want them to come back”

So I’m passing their message along...go back to New Orleans. Eat in the restaurants. Rent hotel rooms or, better yet, for a real New Orleans experience, rent one of the many vacation rentals available in the French Quarter. Drink in the bars. Show your boobs for beads. Tip wildly and extravagantly. You have the perfect opportunity coming up in 2008...the Cheers Beverage Conference, the best beverage consortium there is in the US, will be going back to New Orleans. I can’t wait.

So come join us in ’08 at Cheers in New Orleans. They’re waiting for you and you’ll leave with a conference and conscious experience you won’t soon forget.

And if you’re as lucky as we were, you may be walking down Royal St. after an excellent dinner and the perfect high tenor of a street performer singing ‘Moon River’ will ring out like joy in the quiet and sultry evening, giving you a moment of sheer, unexpected beauty you will never, ever forget. It was a moment where I was as happy as I’ve ever been and I’m counting the days until I get to go back to New Orleans.

Another reason to drink wine

Not that anyone reading this is likely to NEED another reason, but keep this chart (based on info from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service) handy for the day a tea-totaling customer starts blabbing about the evils of alcohol:

Evidence, of a sort, that when wine drinking goes up in a population, crime goes down.

Welcome Gemini

The spirit supplier business is used to frequent change, what with mergers, brand movement and new product introductions. At Sazerac, what was once the Monsiuer Henri company, the original importer of Yago sangria, last week became Gemini Spirits and Wine. This week, they've announced a deal with Scottish company Whyte and Mackay, owner of a number of whiskey brands, including single malts Jura and Fettercairn, and a broad range of blends, including their Whyte and Mackay flagship, which offers seven different expressions, including a 40-year-old.

So suddenly, there's potentially a new player in the Scotch whisky business in the U.S. But what's also interesting is the news that UB Spirits, the fourth largest spirit manufacturer in the world, is angling to buy Whyte and Mackay. Entry to the U.S. market doesn't seem to be the point of the potential purchase, as UB aims to keep Diageo at bay in the India market. But if you thought consolidation in the spirits biz was calming down....

Crafty brewers

Maybe you missed it on our news roll this morning, but it's worth pointing out here: once again, the American craft beer segment has delivered double-digit growth, at a time when Big Beer is either throwing everything and anything with malt in it out the door to see what works, gobbling each other up, sitting on the sidelines or handing their ad campaigns over to smirking smart-asses. And as they do, the crafty termites keep ever so slowly eating away tiny bits of their base. Sure, 6.6 million barrels is less than the big guys spill each year, but can YOU think of any brewer who would pass on that increase today?

Drink of the week

Tepache is an ancient Aztec beverage, but few restaurants up North try making it. Now at Chicago's Las Palmas, a version that's the modern grandson of the rustic fermented beverage is being made from an old family recipe passed down to Las Palmas' sous chef. 

Fresh pineapple skins are added to an orange juice reduction, with cloves, cinnamon, barley, yeast and unrefined brown sugar. It's left to ferment for five days and ends up tasting a bit like beer, it's said. The original version of tepache did not include barley, of course, which arrived with the Europeans.

 
TEPACHE

30 lbs. ripe oranges
6 yellow apples de-cored and sliced
2 Mexican cinnamon sticks
2 tablespoons of cloves
1 whole pineapple
2 lbs. piloncillo (made from pure, unrefined sugar pressed into a cone shape. It tastes very similar to brown sugar with a molasses flavor.)
1lb. sugar
1lb. sugarcane
8 oz. active dry yeast

Juice all the oranges and place into a pot with the piloncillo, sugar and sugarcane. Boil all the ingredients together for ½ hour. Let juice chill. Once chilled place juice in an 18 qt. container. Add 4 qts. water. Cut the top off the pineapple and slice the skin off, but don’t discard skins. Place the yeast into a new kitchen towel and tie into a knot so the yeast stays inside. Add all the remaining ingredients including the pineapple, pineapple skins and towel with yeast into the container.

Place a lid on the container, but make sure it has a few holes in it for air to escape. Place container in a dark, warm area and let ferment for fifteen days. After fifteen days strain the Tepache and keep only the juice. Add sugar to taste. Serve chilled or over ice and garnish with a pineapple slice.

Latest poll results

In our latest poll, we asked you about restaurant menu pricing schemes. More than 62 percent of respondents said they list prices for beer, wine, spirits and cocktails
on their menus. More than 23 percent said they list only wine prices, while 10 percent said they list only beer prices and 5 percent said they list both beer and wine prices.

Tasting with your eyes

I’ve always gone under the assumption that it’s probably wise to examine something closely before starting to consume it. This is just a good, everyday practice. Most of the time, the situation turns out the way you had expected, but there have been a number of times I was happy I’d taken a few seconds to assess what I was about to wolf down.

Therefore, I’m bewildered when people don’t take an extra couple of moments to gauge the wines they are about to drink. As an example, let me relate something that occurred a while back.

A customer had ordered a $100 bottle. He was embroiled in a discussion with his friends about a ski trip he was planning to make to  Colorado next winter. The conversation was getting heated, as one of the guests thought Slope A was going to be the most challenging and the host thought it was definitely Slope B. This struck me as a bizarre thing to get all bothered about while your appetizer got cold, but I usually assume a “whatever rows your boat” philosophy in these instances.

I poured the customer a taste of the wine, so that he might judge the health of the bottle for which he was about to fork out a handsome rendition of Benjamin Franklin. And what did he do? With nary a glance at the glass, he knocks it back in a fashion not dissimilar to W.C. Fields belting back two fingers of rotgut at the New Old Lompoc House. Tasting in this manner made it nearly impossible for him to know what liquid was in the glass, let alone assess any subtle nuances the wine may have had. There is a better way. 

I firmly believe that the quality of most wines can be judged without ever having tasted them. That’s right, if you spend an additional moment or two to really look at each wine and take in its aromas, you should be able to calculate most everything you need to know. Each wine has a specific appearance, its own presence, so to speak. Focusing on young, new releases, here’s what the most popular varieties should look like:

Whites that have been fermented in stainless steel tanks are rather pale and have a gray-green hue, which assumes a bit of yellow as they age. Oak-fermented whites tend to show this yellow at a younger age, and move on to a more buttercup color with some time in bottle. Those that should appear lighter and less viscous in the glass include albarino, pinot grigio, riesling and sauvignon blanc. Chardonnay, gewürztraminer and Rhone varietals (marsanne, muscat, roussane, viognier) appear more golden and thicker, and generally have less acidity and more alcohol.

Lighter reds, such as gamay, pinot noir, sangiovese and tempranillo are transparent and often have a garnet edge, even at two or three years of age. These traits are inherent, and should not be considered as flaws. Then there are the varietals that appear light in color, but bring a punch with them. Two that come to mind are grenache and nebbiolo. Don’t be fooled by their brick-like tinge. These are fuller-bodied wines that can age beautifully for decades. 

There are certain darkly colored wines that are actually less heavy than they appear. These include the three M’s: malbec, merlot and mourvedre. All three are nearly black in the glass, but in fact are only medium-bodied wines, quite capable of dexterity on the table.

The Big Boys are cabernet sauvignon, petite sirah, syrah  (shiraz) and zinfandel. These wines are often opaque, and coat the stemware with legs that a body builder would be proud of. Even with age, they retain the type of appearance that insinuates richness.

These descriptions are certainly generalities. Not all tempranillo is light in color, nor is pinot gris from Alsace or Oregon as pale as pinot grigio from Italy. But, basically, it’s case of what you see is what you get. The aromas one may expect from the above wines are another matter entirely, and worthy of an article on their own. We’ll address that subject down the road. 

Gary tastes in the cold

The BAR scores at Cheers

I like it when the universe gets things right. I like it even better when I get something right. I’ve been wrong often, so it’s a novel feeling. For example, I was wrong about Diet Coke, karaoke, penicillin and the outcome of the last two presidential elections.

What I did get way right, however, was a post a few months back in which I wrote about the impact the Beverage Alcohol Resource program was going to have on the beverage business. It has, and although it was an obvious call, I’m taking credit for it.

As if to back-up my claim, Cheers magazine recognized the program and its founders as “2007 Beverage Innovators of the Year.” The prestigious award was presented to the esteemed team at the recently concluded Cheers Beverage Conference held in stylin’ New Orleans.

What an obvious choice. This educational program is among the most important innovations to hit the beverage business since forever. The Beverage Alcohol Resource (BAR) Intermediate Program for Spirits & Mixology in New York City. The course is the leading and most authoritative source of information on spirits and mixology. Attendees take part in four days of intense and thorough instruction taught by Dale DeGroff, Doug Frost, Steven Olson, F. Paul Pacult, and David Wondrich. Please notice that the names are listed alphabetically, rather than by age, in which case either Paul or Dale go first.

There is no more comprehensive program available, or a more esteemed faculty to teach such a course. Combined these heavyweights have well over 100 years of hands-on experience. Among the subjects covered are how taste spirits like professionals; the histories and pedigree of each spirits category; how to mix drinks in light of cocktail history and what's happening today; what makes a great bar, a great bar; how to best use the tools of bartending and of course how to create superior mixed drinks.

 Look, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that possessing solid working knowledge about mixology, spirits, beers, wines and other pertinent stuff is crucial to succeeding in the business. With success comes money, and with the money come sports cars, fat watches and attractive mates.

If you’re looking to achieve personal fulfillment, financial freedom and a better way of life, attend an upcoming 5-day BAR Certification Program in New York, information can be obtained at the BAR site. There’s simply no better way to spend a workweek.

(Visit Robert Plotkin's Web site for information about his books and seminars.)