Drinking on the Last Frontier: Warm up to a frozen festival — Soldotna plans cool new event

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

February is usually a pretty slow time in the world of craft beer in Alaska. January is always a whirlwind, with Alaska Beer Week and the Great Alaska Beer and Barley Wine Festival in Anchorage, while March is typically when breweries across the state begin ramping up their production schedules to meet the greatly increased demand for their beers during the summer tourist season.

February, though, is usually a slow month.

All that is set to change this year, however. A brand-new festival will be taking place right here on the Kenai, and beer is at the heart of it. The Frozen River Fest will be taking place from 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday at Soldotna Creek Park.

Yes, you read that correctly — there will be an outdoor festival in February (with warming fires, but dress appropriately for the weather).

There will be live music and food vendors, plus activities for the entire family. But this column is about beer, so let’s focus on that part of the festival. The following producers will be at the festival:

Drinking on the Last Frontier: Don’t begrudge the beer judge — Taste is subjective, style stays true to brewing form

Graphic courtesy of Elaine Howell.

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

One of the benefits of being a semiprofessional beer writer is that people frequently offer you beer to drink. Such offers are usually prefaced with something along the lines of, “Tell me what you think of this one.”

The underlying assumption is that because I write about beer, I must by necessity have a superior palate or sensory perception when it comes to evaluating how a beer tastes. While I will confess to having a great deal of experience when it comes to drinking different beers (some might even say a little too much, but that’s a discussion for another day), I don’t believe there’s anything special about my capacity to taste and evaluate beers.

Much of what we think of as taste is actually smell — anyone who has eaten with clogged sinuses knows firsthand just how important a component smell is to perceiving the flavor of any food, including beer.

Smell is also the sense we have the least handle on, when it comes to analytical ability. We understand vision well enough to make artificial eyes (called cameras) that almost everyone has in their cellphones. We understand sound quite well also, and can capture and reproduce it with great fidelity. Our sense of touch and the functions of the taste buds on the tongue are no great mysteries, either.

But the human sense of smell is still over a thousand times more sensitive than our best artificial analogue, and our olfactory cortex also receives inputs from the limbic region, amygdala and hypothalamus, which are all areas of the brain that deal with emotion. How we perceive a particular odor or flavor is tied not only to the chemical perception of the molecule being sensed, but also how we feel about it and how we feel in general. All of which means our perception of both smell and flavor is ridiculously individualistic and subjective.

Drinking on the Last Frontier: Holiday cheers — Plenty of hop hype this gift-giving season

Photo courtesy of Elaine Howell

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

The snow has come at last to the Kenai Peninsula, and Thanksgiving is behind us, so now it’s time to buckle down for some serious Christmas shopping. Once again this year, I’d like to try to help you out with some gift ideas for the craft beer lovers on your list. You can always fall back on just giving them beer or brewery apparel, but here are some other ideas to consider.

• First off, how about something growler-related? Kenai River Brewing Co. is now selling an excellent insulated growler. It’s made of stainless steel, is double-walled to keep the beer inside cool, and finished in a nice black with the brewery’s logo in silver. Most importantly, it has a swing top rather than the plastic screw-on type you see on some insulated growlers. Those caps habitually leak, allowing the growler to depressurize and the beer inside to go flat. This growler is manufactured by Miir and the seal seems excellent. I tested one by letting it sit in my beer fridge for over a week and the beer inside was still perfect when I finally opened it. These growlers are a bit pricy at $55 but should last forever. You can find them at the brewery in Soldotna.

Drinking on the Last Frontier: High marks for High Mark — Distillery toasts law change in tasting room reopening

Photo by Elaine Howell. Visitors sample the spirits at High Mark Distillery at its grand reopening Saturday in Sterling.

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

It’s said that all things come to he who waits. In this case, it could be more accurately said that they come to she who waits, with the lady in question being Felicia Keith-Jones, the owner of High Mark Distillery in Sterling.

As I mentioned in my monthly column earlier this year, Keith-Jones and the four other artisanal distillers in the state banded together and worked hard to convince the Legislature to pass HB 309, a measure to allow distilleries the same privileges granted to wineries and breweries in Alaska — i.e., to have a tasting room in their production facility and to be able to sell their products directly to the public.

While the distillers only had about three weeks to draft and push the bill through before the end of the session, they received excellent support from their representatives and senators, and HB 309 passed with wide margins in both bodies before the end of April. Gov. Sean Parnell delayed signing it in to law until mid-July, which meant that it would not go into effect until Oct. 12, thereby ensuring that the distilleries would miss out on the entire 2014 tourism season. Still, better late than never.

So it’s been a long time coming, but last Saturday, Nov. 15, High Mark Distillery was finally able to celebrate the grand reopening of its tasting room at 37200 Thomas St. in Sterling. All of its bottles were on sale for $25, which represented a substantial savings for many of them. Besides its Nickel Back Apple Jack (36 or 50 proof), its High Mark Vodka (80 proof) and its Blind Cat Moonshine (90 proof), there was a new product on sale, Blueberry Cobbler Shine (58 proof). As it is my duty as a reporter to be extremely thorough, I sampled the new product, and I can report that it is quite delicious, with a wonderful berry flavor and none of the alcohol heat of the higher-proof Blind Cat.

In between customers stopping in to sample and purchase bottles, Keith-Jones told me about a couple of soon-to-be released new products, as well as her hopes for the future of her business.

“We will be releasing our homemade vanilla extract in time for Thanksgiving,” she said. “I did extensive research comparing vanilla pods from all over the world — Tonga, Tahiti, Uganda, Indian, Hawaii, Mexico and Madagascar. In the end, I settled on a blend of Hawaii and Madagascar,” she said. “I’m also excited to be finally producing something that my mother, who is a nondrinker, can enjoy.”

Drinking on the Last Frontier: Beer cheers on the world stage — Alaska brews gain national, international honors

Photo courtesy of Elaine Howell

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter
I have always been impressed by the collegiate nature of the craft-brewing world. For whatever reason, there has always been a strong sense that, “We’re all in this together,” amongst brewers. Craft brewers are famous for going out of their way to help each other out, as opposed to the cutthroat world of the big corporate brewers.
In fact, this sort of friendliness has become such an expected part of the craft-brewing scene that whenever two brewers do find themselves at loggerheads, say over a trademark dispute, to use one of the more frequent issues, it sends reverberations around the craft-brewing community. While an increase in number of such disputes is inevitable, given the explosive growth in the number of brewers in the U.S., the business of brewing craft beer still remains one of the friendliest out there.
Such a friendly attitude doesn’t mean that craft brewers are not competitive — far from it. Since almost the beginning of the craft-brewing movement in the U.S., brewers have competed to be recognized as producing the best beers. Today, two events have emerged as the most prestigious among the hundreds of beer competitions: the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup.

Drinking on the Last Frontier: Brewing up capacity — Brewmaster expanding into own facility

Photo courtesy of Elaine Howell. Anchorage Brewing Co.’s new facility is under construction in Anchorage.

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter
People sometimes ask me, “Since you love beer so much, why don’t you start a craft brewery of your own?” To which I reply, “Because I know just how much hard work being a brewer entails. Drinking beer and writing about it is much easier!”
Fortunately, not everyone is as work-averse as I am, so there are plenty of folks out there willing to take a chance and open a craft brewery. In 2010, Gabe Fletcher, who had been the head brewer at Midnight Sun Brewing Co. for over a decade, came to the conclusion that he was ready to make a leap of faith and open his own brewery, the Anchorage Brewing Co.
When he decided to strike out on his own, Fletcher made two unusual (and, in hindsight, very smart) choices. First, rather than just focus on the local beer market in Anchorage or even Alaska, he negotiated with Shelton Brothers Distributors to purchase three-quarters of his production and distribute it across the country and even internationally. Fletcher’s reputation in the beer world after his stint at Midnight Sun was such that they were happy to agree, even before he’d brewed his first batch.
Second, rather than purchase his own brewhouse, Fletcher rented time on the existing brewhouse at the Sleeping Lady Brewing Co., as well as space in its basement for his fermenters, barrels and bottling line. To be clear, this was not contract brewing, as Fletcher did all the brewing himself. He simply bought time on Sleeping Lady’s equipment.
These two decisions allowed Fletcher to focus his startup capital on what would make his beers unique — huge wooden vats called foudres for his primary fermentation, a forest of used wine and spirits barrels for secondary fermentation and a state-of-art Italian bottling line to fill his 750-ml corked and caged bottles.
His success over the last four years is testament to the farsightedness of these two decisions. Anchorage Brewing Co. beers have won numerous awards and are known and sought after around the world, as beer aficionados everywhere are eager to experience Fletcher’s singular vision of what a craft beer can be.

Drinking on the Last Frontier: Pouring over a good book

Photo courtesy of Elaine Howell.

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

Soldotna enjoyed another extremely successful Kenai Peninsula Beer Festival last month. The fourth production of this outstanding annual event was another sellout, with 1,200 paying attendees and at least a hundred unfortunate latecomers turned away at the gate.

There were more breweries than ever in attendance, including HooDoo Brewing Co. from Fairbanks and 49th State Brewing Co. from Healy. 49th State celebrated its first ever appearance by taking home the People’s Choice trophy for Best Beer with its 12 Quadruple Belgian-style Strong Ale, while Kenai River Brewing Co. won the People’s Choice for Best Brewery for the second year in a row. Additionally, the festival raised lots of money for local charities here on the peninsula. Kudos to the Soldotna Rotary on another superb festival.

It’s been awhile since I have written anything about any new beer books, and several have been released fairly recently. In fact, it seems that books on the subject of craft beer and brewing are being released with ever-increasing frequency, which I take to be an excellent sign of the public’s growing interest in good beer. So let’s talk about a half dozen interesting new volumes.

As some of the oldest craft breweries out there begin to celebrate their 25th or even 30th anniversaries, we are beginning to see the release of histories and autobiographical accounts, looking back to the earliest days of American craft brewing. Two recent books stand out from the pack in this area. The first is “Beyond the Pale,” written by Ken Grossman, the legendary founder of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Grossman is tremendously respected in the craft brewing world as one of the heroic “first generation” of brewers, folks who had to build their breweries from scratch, usually with their own hands, from castoff dairy equipment. His account of the early trials and tribulations of Sierra Nevada is well written and fascinating.

The second book is “The Craft Beer Revolution” by Steve Hindy, one of the founders of the Brooklyn Brewery. It’s a no-holds-barred and often hilarious account of the different sort of challenges faced by that “second generation” craft brewery. It’s totally different in tone, but just as fascinating as Grossman’s account.

The next three books are ones that I would classify as general beer guides — books designed to appeal to the typical craft beer lover, or even to introduce the neophyte to craft beer. The first is patterned after the well-known Haynes auto manuals, only this one is entitled “Beer: 7,000 BC onwards (all flavors).” Published in the UK, it has a distinctly British bent, is lavishly illustrated and presents a nice overview of both homebrewing and commercial craft beers. It would make a great gift for someone just getting into drinking better beer.

Drinking on the Last Frontier: Pour favor — Popular Kenai Peninsula Beer Festival brewing up another year

Photo courtesy of Elaine Howell. Kenai River Beer Festival-goers last year sample the offerings from St. Elias Brewing. This year’s festival is Saturday at the Soldotna Regional Sports Complex.

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

Early August on the Kenai means just one thing for craft beer lovers — it’s time for the annual Kenai Peninsula Beer Festival! This will be the fourth year of this wonderful festival, which is sponsored by the Soldotna Rotary.

Unless you’re a true hard-core craft beer lover like me, your only experience with beer festivals may be attending our local one. If that’s so, allow me to try to convey to you just how lucky we are to have such an outstanding festival right in our own backyard.

If you want to know who puts on a good festival, all you have to do is talk to craft brewers. They attend multiple festivals and have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. Word travels fast on the brewers’ circuit and everyone quickly learns which festivals are well-organized, professional affairs and which ones are chaotic drunk fests. So it speaks volumes that the Kenai festival has quickly gained a reputation amongst the brewers as being well-organized, professionally managed and fun to attend.

Just to be clear, attending our festival is no bed of roses for the brewers. They have to pay their own way to the area, pay for hotel rooms, donate their beer, show up early to set up, pour beer for hundreds of folks for several hours and then clean up afterward. Not exactly a vacation on the Kenai, is it? Plus, this is typically the busiest time of the year for brewers in Alaska, when they are struggling to brew enough beer to keep up with the heavy demand of tourism season. If, on top of all these hurdles, a particular festival isn’t well run, most brewers will quickly cut their losses. They won’t be back the following year and they’ll let all their friends in the business know not to bother attending either.

Given these facts, the rapid increase in the number of breweries in attendance over the last four years speaks volumes about how well the folks behind the Kenai Peninsula Beer Festival do their job. For example, this year all five of the breweries on the peninsula will be in attendance. In fact, this will be the first time that all five of them (Homer, Kassik’s, Kenai River, Seward and St. Elias) will be on offer at the same festival. In total, there will be 14 breweries attending (including HooDoo from Fairbanks and Alaskan from Juneau), three distributors and Bear Creek Winery. If you want to enjoy a maximum amount of beer choice with the minimum amount of travel and expense, this is your chance.

This year’s Kenai Peninsula Beer Festival will be held at the Soldotna Regional Sports Complex, just like last year’s. It will be held from 5 to 10 p.m. Aug. 9. Tickets are $30, on sale at Kenai River Brewing, St. Elias Brewing and Kassik’s Brewery. New this year is the option to purchase tickets online at http://www.kenaibeerfest.com. This buys admission, a commemorative glass and tickets for eight 4-ounce beer samples. You can buy additional sample tickets for $3 per ticket.

Brewing a can-do attitude — Alaska’s craft beer makers expand portable options

Photo courtesy of Elaine Howell, Kenai River Brewing Co. in Soldotna is partnering with Midnight Sun Brewing Co. to offer variety six-packs.

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

Summertime in Alaska means time spent outdoors. No doubt it’s the long, cold months of winter that give us all such an appreciation for being able to get out and enjoy the beautiful outdoors during the short months when we can do so. And if you’re like me, you appreciate the outdoors even more when you’ve got a beer in your hand!

This desire to be able to easily enjoy craft beers in remote or difficult places is one of the driving forces behind the continuing growth in the number of beers being offered in cans by the craft breweries of Alaska. Forget the reputation that cans had decades ago, for holding cheap, metallic-tasting beer. Today’s cans are fully lined, so that the contents never contact the can itself, and provide much better protection from light and oxygen (the two big enemies of beer freshness) to the beer inside than even the best bottle. If you add the fact that cans are unbreakable, easily recyclable and much lighter than glass, it becomes easy to see why cans are so popular with Alaskans on their hiking, camping and boating adventures. There’s nothing like a broken beer bottle in the bottom of the boat to put a damper on the fun of fishing.

Moving into canning represents a significant capital investment for a craft brewery. Besides the expense of the canning machine itself, the typical minimum can order is in the neighborhood of 144,000 cans, enough to fill a semitrailer. Since cans typically come with their labels printed on them, a given production run can only be used for one beer — unlike bottles, which only require that a different label be attached when shifting between beers. The commitment involved in purchasing (and storing) that many containers for a single beer is quite daunting for a small brewing operation.

Yet cans are so clearly superior, especially in Alaska, that more and more of our local craft brewers are taking the plunge. By my count, there are currently six different breweries in our state — Denali Brewing Co., Broken Tooth Brewing Co., Midnight Sun Brewing Co., King Street Brewing Co., Alaskan Brewing Co. and our very own Kenai River Brewing Co. — that are already canning their beers, with a seventh, Baranof Island Brewing Co., only waiting on the delivery of its cans so it can start.

Legality, distilled — Legislation would align Alaska distillery, craft brewing rules

Photo courtesy of Elaine Howell. The Chilkoot Distillery in Haines.

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

What’s the biggest difference between craft brewing and craft distilling? The law.

About 2.1 million Americans make their own beer at home. I’m one of them. Federal law allows an adult to brew up to 100 gallons of beer a year and up to 200 gallons per household, with the only restriction being that the beer is not sold commercially. Last year the last two holdout states, Mississippi and Alabama, bowed to common sense and legalized it, as well. Most of the thousands of commercial craft brewers in the U.S. today started out as homebrewers.

However, if I were to take any amount of the beer I produce at home and distill it, that’s a violation of federal law. While I’m sure there are plenty of “home distillers” out there — after all, Americans have been distilling in defiance of the federal government since at least the Whisky Rebellion in 1791 — they have to keep a very low profile, unlike homebrewers. So you don’t have a bunch of eager hobbyists looking to make the jump to the commercial side of distilling, like you have in the world of craft beer.

Given this handicap, it’s hardly surprising that the growth of craft distilling has lagged behind that of craft brewing. However, things are gradually beginning to change, even here in Alaska. There are now five craft distilleries in Alaska — Ursa Major Distilling in Fairbanks, Alaska Distillery in Wasilla, Bare Distillery in Anchorage, Port Chilkoot Distillery in Haines, and High Mark Distillery in Sterling, right here on the Kenai Peninsula.

In addition to all the other challenges facing small businesses in Alaska, these five distilleries face an additional hurdle — they are legally prohibited from selling their products directly to the customer. It seems that Alaska law, at least as interpreted by the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, denies distilleries the right enjoyed by breweries and wineries to offer samples to their customers and to sell directly to them. As the law stood, they would be required to sell only to distributors, which would then sell their products to liquor stores, restaurants and bars. Since direct sales to customers are a key revenue stream for small, artisanal producers like these, this was a real problem.

Drinking on the Last Frontier: Hop to it — Breweries emerge from winter hibernation

Photo courtesy of Elaine Howell. Seward Brewing Co. is reopen for business with new owners.

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

Spring is here at last, and breweries across the state are awakening from their winter slumbers and ramping up production in anticipation of the hordes of tourists that will soon be descending upon our fair state. The 49th State Brewing Company, located near the entrance to Denali National Park in Healy, reopened for business April 25, while the Seward Brewing Company will reopen May 8, under new ownership.

During their winter shutdown, 49th State Brewing conducted a major expansion program. This expansion included a new, 15-barrel brewhouse and significantly increased fermentation tank space to attempt to meet the growing demand for its beers at the several venues around Denali National Park where they are on offer. The expansion should allow it to triple last year’s production of 500 barrels.

Just as it did in 2012, prior to its shutdown last fall, the brewery produced several beers and left them to condition in its tanks with the brewery thermostat set to just above freezing over the long, cold winter. The styles chosen were all ones that would benefit from a long, cold maturation process. The beers are collectively known as the Hibernation Series and will be released over the course of the summer.

The Seward Brewing Company opened its doors two years ago, in the summer of 2012, on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Washington Street. Originally a mercantile store with offices upstairs, the structure dates from the 1940s and boasts magnificent views of Resurrection Bay and the surrounding mountains. Its most recent incarnation, prior to being renovated as a brewpub, was an Elks Lodge. The owner at that time, Gene Minden, operated the brewpub for two summer seasons, closing each fall and reopening in the spring, before selling it to new owners this winter.

Drinking on the Last Frontier — Beer bubble not likely to burst

By Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

One of the things you can look forward to in the spring, at least if you are an obsessive craft beer fan like yours truly, is the release of the brewery statistics for the prior year. The numbers for 2013 have just been published by the Brewers Association, so let’s take a look.

First and foremost, the share of the total beer market that belongs to craft beers has continued to grow. Even discounting the quite popular “crafty” beers from the big three brewers, true craft beers captured 7.8 percent of the U.S. beer market by volume in 2013, up from 6.5 percent in 2012 and 4.4 percent in 2009. Obviously, craft brews still represent a very small segment of the total U.S. beer market, but this sort of steady, sustained growth is a very pleasant trend.

Turning to retail dollars, craft beers generated $14.3 billion in sales for 2013, which represents a 14.3 percent market share of the $100 billion U.S. beer market. As high-quality artisanal products, craft brews can command top dollar, making them even more important to overall beer sales than their 7.8 percent volume share would suggest. That $14.3 billion in sales represents a 20 percent growth over 2012. Growth rates like these make craft brewers smile and executives at AB-InBev and MillerCoors gnash their teeth and plan the release of more “crafty” beers in an effort to stem the tide.

The sheer number of new breweries and brewpubs continues to grow by leaps and bounds, as well. At the end of 2013 there were 2,822 breweries in the U.S., of which 2,768 were considered craft breweries. That’s a 15 percent increase over the number in 2012. In fact, there are now more breweries operating in the U.S. than at any time in our history, with hundreds more in the process of opening. We really are living in the Golden Age of American brewing!