INTO THE BREW


Sprechen Sie Bier? An American in Munich By Sam Tierney


Sam Tierney


Sam began his love affair with great beer while studying and traveling abroad in Europe as a junior at University of Califor- nia, Santa Barbara. Upon returning home to California in late 2007, he opened the eyes of his then-roommate, Ryan Lamb, to the world of craft beer. Sam began homebrewing immediately and has won awards in the categories of Belgian Ale, French Ale and Belgian Specialty Ale at the Santa Cruz County Fair. Today, Sam is training to become a professional brewer as a student in the Master Brewer Program at the Siebel Institute of Technol- ogy in Chicago. He’ll continue document- ing his journey for West Coaster as the class studies abroad in Europe.


ry tour. Our professor tells us, “Anything in these three piles is fine. Take as much as you want.” He surely had to be kidding, right? My mind was not quite prepared to handle this, despite a previous warning from another student: “I heard that we’re going to get as much free beer as we want. Someone told me to rent a car to get as much as we can back to the hotel.” It was almost too good to be true; we had access to as much free beer as we wanted from the cases upon cases of beer leftover from the European Beer Star Awards. We were even able to find a bottle of Ballast Point Sculpin, which had taken the gold medal in the IPA category. I knew right then that I was going to like Doemens, and this was just our first day.


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Part of the attraction of the Interna- tional Diploma Course at Siebel was the chance to come to Germany and study under actual German brewmasters. Here, brewing is much more institutionalized: you have to actually earn a master’s degree in brewing to become a brewmas- ter. One of our professors did his PhD work at Weihenstephan, the Bavarian state brewing university, on the gushing effect that can happen when you open a bottle of beer. These guys are serious, and the Ger- man brewer is very much shaped by this system as well as a little thing called the Reinheitsgebot.


The Reinheitsgebot, or “German Beer Purity Law” proclaims that German beer is only allowed to be brewed with malt, hops, water and yeast. In the first week they gave the international students an hour-long lecture on the subject, and I was a little surprised to learn that there is


ere we were, standing in the bot- tling room at Doemens Academy in Munich, getting the introducto-


Yakima Chief Experimental Hops at Brau Beviale


more to the equation. A few surprises included the prohibition of using wheat in lager beers and the freedom to use “pure” sugar in wheat beers. Also, brewers can’t mix more that 15% lager beer with wheat beer, they can add brew- ing salts to their brewing water but not their mash, and wheat beers always have to be made of at least 50% wheat. Contrary to what some people think, the Reinheitsgebot doesn’t prohibit Ger- man brewers from brewing other styles. It is mostly out of tradition and culture that the beer scene is so static. This is a great definition of a self-fulfilling proph- ecy: consumers think the Reinheitsge- bot dictates that their beer must taste a certain way, and the brewers oblige them in order to sell their beer. Consequently, if you have ever trav-


eled to Germany or even just perused the German section at your local beer store, you have probably noticed that there isn’t a whole lot of variety, especially compared to the wealth of different styles that are being brewed by American craft brewers these days. When you go to a beer hall in Munich, you get probably six beers if you are lucky: a helles, pils, spezial (or export), weissebier, dunkel, and bock. All of these beers are almost guaranteed to be from the same brewery because the brewery either owns the beer hall or has a contract with it as its exclu- sive supplier. Yes, Germans make other beers like Kölsch, Altbier, and Berliner weissebier, but if you want a Kölsch you’d better get a train ticket to Cologne (Köln). Good luck finding a dunkel or weissebier once you get there, and so on. At the Brau Beviale convention in


Nuremburg during the second week of the course, I got to attend an American hop tasting led by Brewers Association President Charlie Papazian, Firestone Walker brewmaster Matt Brynildson, and Eric Toft, brewmaster at Schönram in Bavaria, who is originally a Wyoming native. Toft was adamant that German brewers should start to experiment with new styles and American hops. He should soon be brewing the first German IPA to see a commercial release. It seems as though American-style craft brewing may slowly but surely be creeping into ultra-traditional Bavaria as the world- wide craft beer movement progresses.


To read more from Sam, go to westcoastersd.com and search “Sam”


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