I’ve just met a beer whisperer. She helps craft beer express the good times it’s had, the food it wants to pair with and its place in the proletarian taste division of the local and sustainable food movement.
Her name is Tracy Phillippi and she’s a high-level tippler, qualified as a judge by the international Beer Judging Certification Program. Weekends she works as a taste educator (“I help people throw beer parties,” she says), weekdays as a local and sustainable food campaigner, weeknights as a writer on her blog, Experience Craft Beer.
As part of my research, I asked her to co-host two parties for me. The first thing I learn – a mere 5,000 years after ancient Sumerians invented brewing – is that beer is a terrific icebreaker. Phillippi starts off asking participants to share early beer memories.
James remembers sitting on his late dad’s lap on the back porch of a summer evening and being initiated into male bonding with a spoonful of beer. David recalls his summer job working in the hop fields of southern England. John was a bartender during Kitchener’s famous beer fest and pukathon.
This taught me how easy it is for entertainers to get people to cry in their beer. After all, it’s a coming-of-age as well as a social and alcoholic comfort food, so casting back to special moments opens the tear ducts.
Phillippi sees beer’s evocative powers broadly. “Beer has the power to connect people to history, water, farming, community, economy and friends,” she says, which is why this co-founder of the world’s first Youth Food Policy Council is in the beer ed biz.
Our job as dinner guests is to drink five courses of different beers from some of Ontario’s 30 craft breweries – Hockley Stout, Black Creek Porter, Beau’s Lug-Tread, Mill Street Wit and Creemore Kellerbier. Each course is followed by a variety of breads and crackers, a range of local, sustainable, artisanal cheeses and two Mexico-sourced chocolate pieces made by T.O.’s ChocoSol.
Phillippi insists we sip from wide-mouthed wine glasses, the best way to assess beer for appearance, aroma, flavour and mouth-feel. The big pint glasses at taverns cue people to knock the stuff back, while German-style mugs prevent spills when swaying to beer hall songs.
With few exceptions, craft beers obey the German Reinheitsgebot law of 1516, the oldest food regulation on any government’s books. It permits four ingredients: barley malt, yeast, water and hops. Some craft and traditional European beers are allowed to include wheat, spice and a little fruit.
It doesn’t take long for the carbonated Phillippi to present beer as the world’s quintessential food of geographic, technical, as well as cultural “terroir.” Wine grapes grow in warm climates, while beer comes from colder areas where hardy barley grows. Some beers use soft water from the River Plzen, where sweet and flowery pilsner beer originated, while stout beers are made with hard water. Roasting the barley can produce light or dark beers. Hops are a natural preservative that can be hopped-up or not.
Still other beer styles were preferred by working stiffs, like the porters, thought to be rich in iron, protein and B vitamins. (Guinness was marketed as a health drink to nursing mothers during World War II.) And of course, beer has always been part of a good time with friends in public spaces or pubs.
My inner Michel Foucault tells me that prohibitionists were as much against public watering holes as beer and hated pubs because they had too many nooks, crannies and dark hideaways – the opposite of bright-lit open spaces amenable to easy supervision in industrial design.
Before the rise of industrial beer, lager (introduced by German immigrants) was the drink of Americans, and ale (introduced by Brits) the drink of most Canucks, save for western Canada, where German-born brewer Fritz Sick introduced commercial lager during the late 1800s.
Just as beer belongs with wine in terms of terroir, it matches wine in enhancing food. Sommeliers pair wine with the perfect foods cicerones – a career of the future – do the same for beer. The general rule, says Phillippi, is that the beer should be a bit more intense than the food it’s paired with – dark, bitter beer for dark bitter chocolate or floral beer with herbal cheeses.
In the U.S., craft beer hails mainly from Vermont and Oregon, two leading foodie states. In Ontario, brewers such as Beau’s and Mill Street are prominent funders of organic, environmental and sustainable causes.
Who knows? The drinking of craft beer may even mesh with the theme of the future – less is beautiful, or what Welsh food analyst Kevin Morgan calls the coming quality revolution.
There’s an opportunity here – as there is for wine, wheat, coffee, meat, cheese and scores of everyday food products – to use the savings from reduced quantity to increase quality, a benefit to human health, the environment and local employment.
Fifth Town Cheese, whose products we sampled between beers, has adapted Michael Pollan’s famous haiku, urging customers to “eat cheese, mostly artisanal, not too much.” I’ll toast to that thought for the future of beer.
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