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Page eight : Monday, April 19, 2010

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The No-Fear Guide to Beer

By Justin Brenis, The Cauldron Copy Editor

his is an article about BEER. Do I have your attention? Yeah, I thought so.

So you think you know all there is to know about beer, huh? Let me ask you something: - Do you have enough empty Natty Lite cans laying around that you could build yourself some furniture IKEA would be jealous of?

- Did you spend your tuition refund check on a new Ping-Pong ball and Solo cup collection?

- What if I asked you if you’ve ever had an Arrogant Bastard? Would you sooner list off all of your regretful one-night stands sooner than you would just say “yes” or “no”?

If you answered “yes” to any one of those questions, then do I have a surprise for you. (If by any chance you answered “yes” to them all, then shame on you…I mean, seriously.)

Welcome to The TOP SECRET: No-Fear Guide to Beer. My name is Justin and I’ll be your tour guide (and self-proclaimed “beer snob”) through this wonderfully scattered little file of libation information.

When you think about beer on an average college student’s budget in Cleveland, what do you think of?

I’ll bet for the most part it ends up with you, and a few buddies, going to a store, picking up some Bud Lite or Natty and then tossing them back. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s fine, but what if I told you for just about the same amount of money you could experience beer like never before, from all around the world, without ever leaving the city limits?

Well it’s true. Here on campus we are literally no more than 15-20 minutes away from a plethora of amazing beers that will expand your palates and enhance everything you ever thought about the common beer.

Take for example that mysterious gateway, the Bob Hope Memorial bridge, to the illusive “West Side.” Yes, I mean that magical place most eastern Clevelanders ne’er dare tread. Well folks, if the beer enthusiast in you is beginning to feel a bit stifled under all those Miller High Life cans, then perhaps a little getaway to West 25th Street is in order.

What is there for me on West 25th Street, you ask?

Only eight minutes from campus, both McNulty’s Bier Markt (pronounced Beer Market) and Cleveland’s favorite son, The Great Lakes Brewery (GLB), reside there and both are excellent establishments to begin expanding your beer palate.

Luke Purcell, brewmaster at the Great Lakes Brewery, has been in the business of beer for a very long time. “I’ve always liked beer,” he says, “as long as I can remember anyway.” When asked what got him started in the brewing business itself, his answer was one that many people don’t even realize is an option, home brewing. “I started to try out better and better beers,” Purcell shared, “and tried making my own beer in my basement…[with] one of the mail-order kits that came with the syrup and the extract in the kit…because it was hard to find good beer back then.”

Starting out in packaging and working his way up to the brewmaster position, Purcell has been there for 14 years. After getting more involved in the brewing end of things, the GLB decided to send Purcell to Beer Technical School, offered at the Siebel Institute in Chicago. There they learn the basics of what it takes to make a beer that easily rivals the yellow, watereddown beverages college students drink on a weekly basis.

Two things Purcell understands very well that all people new to craft beers should come to know are what a beer’s ABV and IBU are, and what they mean. “There are two ways that they measure alcohol [content]: alcohol by weight (ABW) and alcohol by volume (ABV), which is the bigger of the two numbers,” he explained. “Essentially they are the same thing, but more is better in some people’s minds…so ABV is just the percentage of the alcohol in the beer when compared to all the other ingredients.”

When it came to IBUs however, the explanation was slightly more technical. “IBU stands for International Bittering or Bitterness Units,” Purcell said, “and…is an international scale that all brewers in the world use now…[to] kind of [give] you an idea how much bitterness there is [in your beer].” He then went on to explain how exactly an IBU number is ascribed to a beer. “It’s basically on a 1 to 100 scale, and you can exceed that supposedly—it’s not easy to do but it can be done…so it’s usually in the range of 80 to 100. I feel once you get up to around 80 or 90 you can’t tell the difference, kind of like scoville units with hot peppers, when you get to a certain threshold it’s just burning your mouth.” He noted, however, that people shouldn’t fear a beer with a high IBU, and just because a beer is noted as bitter or “hoppy” doesn’t mean that bitterness can’t be balanced out with the sweetness of malts.

When asked, he said he always tells people his favorite beer at the brewery is their award-winning Edmund Fitzgerald Porter. “It’s real dark and roasty… and [even] before I [worked] here it was my favorite beer.” However, if the idea of a darker beer, which tends to be a bit less pleasant and slightly too bitter to the untrained eye and tongue, respectively, Purcell kindly made some suggestions that you and your fellow Vikings should scope out.

“If [you] drink…a generic, yellow beer then we do have a pilsner called The Wright Pils,” he said, “named after the Wright Brothers.” Also along the lines of their lighter beer selection, he recommended, “Our Dortmunder Gold…a really well balanced golden lager and…a really good place to start usually.”

Beyond those two, Purcell explained “It just depends on [your] palate. If [you] don’t like bitterness much we have [the] Eliot Ness Amber Lager that has a bit of a darker color.” If there is one thing he feels an average college drinker should try and get over it is, “That “I don’t like dark beer” kind of mentality [which] leads you to taste with your eyes first and is the first hard hurdle to get over. Stouts for example, just because of

Monday, April 19, 2010 : Page nine Photography by Justin Brenis

[their] dark color doesn’t mean [they are] going to be bitter and nasty…”

Right down the street from the GLB is CSU graduate Sam McNulty’s pride and joy, an homage to Belgian Beer, appropriately named McNulty’s Bier Markt. Founded in 2005, along with its restaurant compatriot Bar Cento (pronounced Chen-toh), the Bier Markt, “was originally going to be a world tour of beer.” What made him decide to focus strictly on Belgian brews instead? Well, in what may go down as the epitome of strange-but-true stories, McNulty said, “I was backpacking through India and met a Polish guy who was working at a Belgian beer bar in Australia…we started talking about how many of the best beers in the world come from Belgium. Next thing I know, the concept was now a bar specializing in Belgian beer.” And specialize they most certainly do.

The beer menu, which can be ordered from both the Bier Markt and Bar Cento, is over a foot long and clocks in at roughly five or six pages from cover to cover. To top off this already awesome selection, McNulty plans to add to Cleveland’s up-and-coming brewery scene by opening up The Market Garden Brewery, whose motto aptly is “Where Beer is Bliss…” sometime in the near future.

When asked what sparked opening up his own brewery in conjunction with featuring such a large selection of world brews, McNulty had this to say: “Why let someone else have all the fun of making the beer?” Like his neighbor Luke around the corner, McNulty had, “been home brewing for years, so it was a natural step.” The next step was all in who you know, and luckily, McNulty knew Andy Tveekrem, former GLB Brewmaster, and most recently the brewmaster for Dogfish Head Breweries, another craft brewery out of Chicago. Tveekrem, also known as ‘The Striking Viking’, “is going to be bringing his famous talents to our new Market Garden Brewery,” McNulty proudly boasted.

“But the West Side is scary, Justin, it is a dangerous, unfamiliar territory—terra incognita at its very worst.” First, let me commend you on your grasp of basic Latin, and then assuage your fears by telling you the West Side is not the only area in Cleveland that can hold its own against your newly trained beersnobitude. Yes, believe it or not, even closer to campus than you’d think, the East Side is home to some great places to expand that beer palate of yours.

For starters, a mere 18 city blocks towards Public Square is Cleveland’s newest night scene since the days of the Flats…East 4th Street. East 4th Street is home to such establishments as Cleveland culinary king Michael Symon’s restaurant Lola, Pickwick and Frolic, and a newer establishment known as The Greenhouse Tavern. Greenhouse, owned and operated by head chef Jonathan Sawyer (recently named one of Food and Wine Magazines “Best New Chefs”), runs on a theory of pure sustainability in everything it does. What does this mean, exactly? Adopting a “green” initiative, the Tavern is built mostly out of materials donated by local donors like the original lab tables from Case Western’s science department, light

fixtures made from bicycle wheels, and hosts a rooftop garden where a number of vegetables and herbs served at the restaurant are grown, w e a t h e r permitting.

This also means that they seek to work with like-minded business when it comes to picking food distributors and, in the case of this article, beers to feature. “I would say it’s kind of my love affair with all ingredients that got me into beer,” Sawyer shared. “Shortly after getting into culinary school I realized this is what I am going to do with the rest of my life, so I went on this mission to conquer as many beers…as I possibly could for the rest of my life and that is kind of how it all started.”

“One thing I do kind of like about beer,” Sawyer pointed out, “is that you can view beer as the ‘affordable luxury’ and [that] makes sense [of spending] a couple of extra bucks on a beer. Rather than really splurging on a bottle of wine, in our current economic times it really makes sense to have an affordable luxury. So if you need to celebrate, maybe it isn’t a bottle of really expensive Champagne anymore, maybe it’s a bottle of Saison D’Maison, our house beer.”

With all this talk about “craft” or “micro-” brews, Chef Sawyer took a minute to help clarify the difference between them and what you get at your local 7/11. “The term ‘craft-brewer’ [is] more like a chef owner/operated restaurant. You are having the brewer brew the beer and sell the beer to you, as opposed to having the brewer’s brewmaster’s hired hands getting it to you. So [it is] the more owner/ operator style kind of brewery.”

In the end, it was Chef Sawyer who really broke it down into college language, and offered these final words of advice to you, the soon to be college beer snob. “You need to think about your palate just like you think about your education,” he said. “While that 12-pack of Natty Lite may only cost you six dollars, you could get a [better] beer that has 10% alcohol, which equals about four of those [Natty Lites] for the same price. You can also...try...draft beers which are much more affordable than the bottles and begin to educate your palate like that.”

There you have it folks, your own personal guide to leaving boring beer in the dust. Keep in mind though, the aforementioned restaurants are only a few of the many great beer finds in Cleveland, so have some fun and explore! While exploring make sure you use this guide like you should drink your beer, responsibly, and, above all else, enjoy.