By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter 
Welcome to Drinking on the Last Frontier. My name’s Bill Howell. I’ve been drinking craft beer and brewing my own for over 20 years, and in this column I’m going to try to convey to you some of the joy and excitement I feel whenever I get the chance to sample an interesting and well-made brew. You might even learn a little something about the history and science of brewing beer, but that will be strictly incidental, I promise.
Normally, I’d start with talking about what’s up at our three local breweries, but Jenny Neyman’s recent article on their seasonal brews has more or less stolen my thunder for a bit, so let’s look at another excellent beer that is hitting the local shelves: Alaskan Brewing Company has just released their Smoked Porter for 2009.
What’s the big deal, you ask?
Well, a few hundred years ago, smoked beers certainly were no big deal. Barley malt, one of the main ingredients in beer, was created by drying germinating barley over wood fires, fires which gave off plenty of smoke. So all beers were smoked beers then. With the invention of other means of drying (like using smokeless coke for fuel or indirect heat from steam), smokiness in a beer was seen as a defect, rather than an inevitability and was more or less done away with, excepting only a few holdouts, like the rauchbiers from Bamberg in Germany (“rauch” means “smoke” in German).
Then in 1988, Alaskan Brewing Company in Juneau decided to try to create their own smoked beer. They used a salmon smokehouse, Taku Smokeries, across the street to make their own alderwood-smoked malt, and Alaskan Smoked Porter was born. In the ensuing 21 years, this Smoked Porter has won more medals at the Great American Beer Festival than any other beer and has inspired many other brewers to cook up their own smoked concoctions. Look for a new batch of Alaskan Smoked Porter about this time every year.
So what sort of beer is it? Well, it weighs in at about 6.5 percent Alcohol By Volume (ABV) and 45 International Bittering Units (IBUs). ABV needs no explanation, while IBUs are a measure of the bitterness imparted to a beer from hop additions. For comparison, Budweiser has 5 percent ABV and 8.5 IBUs, so obviously there’s quite a bit more to this porter than the typical American brew.
As for the taste, it’s dry, roasty and chocolaty, with medium hop bitterness. The smoke flavor is there, but not so overpowering that the rest of the beer is masked by it. This brew is a real classic, and well-deserving of the many medals it has won. It’s great with roast meats, smoked seafood or as an ingredient in marinades and sauces. It’s unusual in another way as well.
The vast majority of beers are made to be drunk as soon as possible. When they leave the brewery, they are as good as they’re ever going to get. It’s all downhill from there. Hence the emphasis on the “born on” or “best before” dates. Light, heat, oxygen — they’re all enemies of good beer, leading to chemical reactions that produce the dreaded stale or skunked beer.
However, certain beers can actually improve with age, developing different and desirable flavors. Experience has shown that Alaskan Smoked Porter ages amazingly well. The brewery occasionally conducts “vertical tastings,” where they compare porters from various years to each other. They report that after three or four years, the smoke begins to fade, to be replaced with flavors such as sherry, currant or raisin. Personally, I’ve been buying several extra bottles of this beer for the last few years, and I look forward to having a vertical tasting of my own with a few beer-loving friends.
If you decide you want to lay down a few bottles of this beer, or any other, to save for the future, here’s how you should go about it. Just put them in a cool (55 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit), dark place that doesn’t have a lot of temperature variation. Beer bottles should be stored upright, not on their side like wine. If you’re really ambitious, you’ll have a cellar “book.” This is just a notebook or some other place where you check brews “in” when you add them to your cellar and then “out” when you decide to drink one. If you’ve got a huge cellar, a book helps make sure you don’t lose something amongst all your other treasures. Then, just sit back and let time do the rest.
So, if you like the flavor of smoked food, grab yourself a 2009 Alaskan Smoked Porter and give it a try. You can probably even find some 2008 still on the shelves to jump-start your beer cellar.
Until next month, Cheers!
Bill Howell is a home brewer and teaches a beer appreciation class at Kenai Peninsula College’s Kenai River Campus, starting in January. Drinking on the Kenai will appear the first Wednesday of the month in the Redoubt Reporter.
