Beer Radar
By John Krüger
We met in a bar.
(First published by Wine Business Magazine in 2010)
With some fantastic stories about the beer that changed people’s lives under our belt, it’s about time that I recounted my own experiences. There are three distinct beer moments that have happened in my life. They weren’t biblical in nature but they broadened my horizons further than any advertising campaign could dream of.
The first was when I was a longhaired eighteen-year-old living in the country with not much more on my mind than working on cars, moving to a place with women and playing pinball. My drink of choice was passed down to me from my older brother, American whiskey, but in those seasonal employment days, unemployment benefits didn’t stretch far enough for American whiskey. My father was an ex-home brewer and he decided to share the knowledge of “dump & stir”; the process of brewing extract tins of Coopers stout. We were brewing a batch every weekend, and during the coldest months, Dad’s “paint shed” was transformed into a walk in cool room chock full of big Henry’s, all full of stout.
The second moment was when a small Scottish home brewer gave me a taste of all-grain beer. It tasted like real commercial quality beer instead of dodgy extract beer. The first sip of his beer sitting in his little kitchen rocked my world and I’ll never forget him explaining in a strong Scottish accent about his “total control” over the beer. It was a Scotch ale, a style I’m still none too fond of but the quality of the beer surpassed the few imported versions that were available to us at the time.
The third was with a friend of mine called Sam, an ex-country bloke like myself who also had a passion for all-grain home brewing. He’d design a uranium processing plant during the week, then knock out the most amazing beers on the weekend. For a while he was my home brew guru, discussing the finer points of decoction mashing and it’s relation to alpha and beta amylase reactions with starches. One afternoon we sat in the Thebarton Wheatsheaf hotel’s front bar working our way through the taps. A mutual decision was made to order a couple of bottles of hefeweizen since we’re both wheat beer aficionado’s. We were served two bottles of Schneider Organic Edelweiss that were served in tall Schneider branded glasses. As we coaxed the last of the yeast from the bottles into the glasses, we could hear other patrons enquiring about our unusual 500ml bottles and tall glasses. The beer was sublime. Fresh German and American hops in perfect unison. German precision and balance. Loads of esters jumping from the glass, bananas, yeasty fruit and funk galore. Smooth flavourful complexity that gave me goosebumps. I was in love.
Sam waited until I’ve almost finished the 500ml glass and enquired “Can you taste the baked beans?”
I laughed, hesitated and took another sip. “Baked beans?” I thought, “surely not”…. “Oh you bastard.” I replied as I picked up on the background flavour of tinned baked beans. My beer rapture had been turned out into the street. It was a moment akin to when you realize the pretty girl at school you’d been doting over will never go out with you, but she seems to have the beginnings of a gnarly set of side burns and you don’t really like her anymore anyway. The flavour had been hovering around in the background before I could put my finger on it, and now 50% of the hefeweizens I taste have an element of tinned baked beans in tomato sauce. Most respected beer writers I’ve asked guess at a fermentation issue but my own brewing experiments leave it all down to the brand of malted wheat. Either way, it was a starry-eyed love affair that was short lived, even if I do still lust after a fresh Schneider Organic Edelweiss on occasion.
