You tear the pull-tab off a tallboy can of Oasis, a double IPA from a microbrewery halfway across the continent that showed up without fanfare a local retail outlet.

You have the bartender draw you a pint of The Public, a hoppy pale ale from the first packaging brewery in Washington, DC, since the Eisenhower Administration.

Did you ever think about the long and winding road that your beer took from the brewery to your lips?

It’s a Big Beer World

There are over 13,000 brands of beer registered in this country, according to the National Association of Beer Wholesalers. Some accounts, like the Westover Market in Falls Church, VA, will take whatever you’ve got. The grocery store lines it shelves with over 1,000 brands for takeout and operates a small bar and beer garden. “It’s chaos!” laughs Zachary Duarte as he shows me their cold room, which contains an Everest of kegs and cardboard cartons, alongside boxfuls of dormant tap handles.

Most businesses need to be more selective. Recently, I was allowed to sit in on a meeting between Dogfish Head Craft Brewery’s Sam Calagione, a partner in Manhattan’s recently-opened Birreria brewpub, and the managerial staff as they plotted beer orders. The group poured over a printout listing units sold over the past month for 35 brands: house-brewed and guest beers, bottled and draft. Written next to each were comments like “sold three 50-liter kegs in five days,” “spikes depending on crowd,” “failed to sell well.” Calagione says he’s a proponent of “craft beer Darwinism”: “If a beer is doing well, award the brewery with another tap to see how it goes.”

Birreria, perched on the fifteenth story of a high-rise cater-corner from Manhattan’s famous Flatiron Building, attracts a young, adventurous, well-heeled crowd who are willing to pay $10 a pint for house beers like the chestnut mild and thyme pale ale, and as much as $38 a bottle for some of the specialty imports from Calagione’s Italian partners in the venture. “People want a back story here. They want to have fun,” remarks general manager Allen Arthur.

“The world’s oldest brewery was reaching out to a guy who was making beer in his kitchen 26 years ago,” thought an amazed Koch.

Thus began the partnership that led to Infinium, a beer that stretches the frontiers of brewing science and raises the philosophical question: can you call it a new “style” if it’s the only one of its kind in the world?

At the time, nether Koch nor Schrädler had an inkling that this mission would last three years, tax the ingenuity of master brewers on both sides of the Atlantic, and require them basically to throw away the textbook on beermaking and turn the normal brewing process on its head.

From the outset, Koch and his collaborators at Weihenstephan had a basic idea of what they wanted to brew. As Koch describes it, it would be “a champagne style of beer, strong, but not cloying or thick, dry but not thin, highly carbonated.” It would occupy a “white space” in the spectrum of German beers that had never before been occupied.

Koch originally envisioned a beer 15-18% alcohol by volume. “But if you make a beer that high in alcohol, it’s like a spirit or liquor,” commented Weihenstephan brewmaster Frank Peifer. “The high fermentability combined with thin body is not good for the complexity.”

The parties agreed on alcohol content of 10%, which is still stronger even than most German doppelbocks.

For an American brewer, making such a beer would be a piece of cake. He’d simply replace part of the grain bill with high-fructose corn syrup, a substance that yeast cells gobble up as greedily as junk food addicts do Twinkies. A Belgian brewer might use candi sugar to brew a tripel, a beer that manages to be elegant and light on the palate in spite of an 8-9% alcohol-by-volume content.

However, Koch and his Weihenstephan colleagues were bound by the Reinheitsgebot (“purity law”), a 500-year-old diktat that limits the ingredients in brewing to a basic four: barley malt, hops, water and yeast. Adjuncts and artificial enzymes are strictly forbidden.

Sometimes, a conundrum in brewing can be solved by the substitution of single ingredient. And Weihenstephan has one of the world’s most extensive yeast banks. According to Peifer, It includes a mutant ninja strain called Saccharomyces diastaticus, which is capable of fermenting complex carbohydrates that would give ordinary yeast cells indigestion.

That was rejected for two reasons. First, says Peifer, “the flavor was not very nice” in the test batches. Secondly, there was the danger of cross-contamination. If S. diastaticus took up residence in a batch of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, for instance, it would begin devouring the residual sugars, turning the beer cloudy and possibly exploding the bottles.

Scratch that one.

Koch and his team tried different malts at different temperatures, using long, decoction-style mashes to break down the cell walls in the grain and allow the natural enzymes in the barley to convert the starches to sugars more efficiently.

“We made slight incremental improvements, half a percent of alcohol at a time,” Koch recalled. He and the Weihenstephan brewers were able to raise the RDF (real degree of fermentation) to 68%… meaning that the yeast was converting 68% of the dissolved sugars into CO2 and alcohol. But that meant “we were leaving about a third of the fermentable material in the beer,” he added. Koch estimated that they would have to get the RDF to near 80% to brew the kind of beer they wanted. Their goal was still a long way off.

“There were lots of dead ends. It took two years to get a breakthrough.”

That breakthrough, he remembers, came not with shouts of Eureka! or a light bulb flashing over the head, but the gradual dawning that “you couldn’t get there through the conventional framework of brewing.”

The crucial insight was that Mother Nature was as frugal as she was provident. “’Wait a minute!’ we thought. The stuff wouldn’t be in the grain if the grain couldn’t break it down into sugars that the embryonic plant could use. The whole purpose is give the plant energy to grow. And if the plant can get to it, the yeast ought to be able to.”

The problem lies in the malting process, which greatly speeds up what happens when barley grains are planted in the earth.  At the malthouse, barley is steeped in water until the grains sprout, after which they’re kiln-dried at temperatures of 130 degrees Fahrenheit and higher. The purpose of malting is to unleash naturally occurring enzymes that will be needed to convert starches into sugar for the yeast to use.

The maltster accomplishes in about four days what would take Mother Nature a month. But what he gains in time and efficiency, he loses in diastatic power… the ability to generate those all-important enzymes. Part of these chemicals are broken down by the unnaturally high temperatures during the malting process. (In fact, highly roasted malts, the chocolate and black patent malts that lend beer a deep ruby-red or mahogany color, have lost their diastatic power completely. Even the darkest stout must brewed with a grain bill of mainly pale malts; otherwise, no sugar would be produced for fermentation to take place.)

What if we could replicate the conditions in nature, Koch and his brew crew wondered, and do a longer germination at lower temperatures to modify the malt fully?

The first step was to contact Bruno Vachon, owner of Malterie Frontenac, a small specialty malting house in Thetford Mines, Quebec. “They didn’t really know what they needed,” recalls Vachon, who studied at the Doemens Institute, another prestigious German brewing academy. “We made tests of various grains, and looked at ways of maximizing the enzyme content. We pushed the envelope the way we steeped the barley, the way we germinated it, the way we dried it.” The result was a very underkilned pale malt, much like German Pilsner malt, but with two or three times its diastatic power. “We made in the neighborhood of 50 tons,” says Vachon, a huge chunk of business for a maltery that produced about 300 tons altogether last year.

(Ironically, he noted that he hadn’t yet tasted the finished product. “Infinium wasn’t available in our part of Canada and I haven’t been able to cross the border to get some for myself.”)

The special malt wasn’t enough to ensure success. Mashing, that part of the brewing process in which the grains are mixed with water and heated to temperatures of about 150 degrees, can also break down the enzymes. Koch and his cohorts turned the normal brewing regimen on its head. They removed a portion of the mash—dubbed the “supernatant”—and allowed the conversion of starches to sugars to proceed at typical soil temperatures—between 60 and 80 degrees. At those temperatures, the process slowed to a relative crawl. “The normal mash time is two hours,” observed Koch. “We needed 300 times that.” (Do the math – that equals 25 days!)

“You can’t tie up your mash tun for weeks,” note Koch, so this leisurely conversion took place in a fermenter—normally the vessel where beermaking concludes, not where it begins.

The rest of the mash (Koch wouldn’t say how it’s divided up—the exact percentages are proprietary) goes through the regular brewing process, receiving a kettle addition of noble hops (mostly the same Hallertau Mittelfrüh hops that go into Sam Adams Boston Lager). It’s then combined with the supernatant in the fermenter. “We started it with the Sam Adams ale yeast that produces a lot of fruitiness,” noted Koch. After a primary fermentation of “a few weeks,” the brewers added a second yeast (also top-fermenting) bred to work in a high-alcohol environment. The beer also received a dry-hopping with noble hops.

Up to this point, Boston Beer Co. and Weihenstephan had been brewing parallel batches, swapping note with one another, Here is where the two beers diverged. Koch transferred his version of Infinium to Pleasant Valley Wine Company (maker of Great Western Champagne) in Hammondsport, NY. There a final fermentation was sparked in the bottle to naturally carbonate the beer. The beer went through the methode champenoise, which involves “riddling” the bottles (rotating them with the cork pointed downwards) and removing the spent yeast from the bottleneck through a process called degorgement.

In Weihenstephan, the final fermentation took place in the same stainless steel tank that the brewery uses for its Hefeweissbier. “It’s Germany!” laughs Koch. “Everything’s over-engineered there.” The pressure that builds up as the beer is carbonated would have ruptured his own vessels, he adds.

Neither Koch nor Peifer believes the difference in procedure had any significant effect on the flavor.

At last, more than three years after the project began, Boston Beer shipped out about 200,000 of the 750-ml gold-embossed bottles of Infinium to retailers across North America.

As an exercise in problem-solving, Infinium was a success. But how does it taste?

Infinium is much less a departure from normal beers than was Utopias, the 27% alcohol-by-volume behemoth that resembled a cognac or whiskey more closely than a beer. It has a delicate, fruity flavor with notes of peach or strawberries; one of my fellow tasters detected a hint of kiwi fruit. There is, however, a sweet, almost sugary malt backbone that identifies it as a grain-based rather than grape-based beverage. The effervescence is brisk, and the beer hides its 10.3% ABV alcohol content well; there is no “hot” taste in the back of the throat. If Boston Beer decides to repeat this beer next year (and Koch says he will, with a few tweaks to enhance the fruitiness), it would make a fine substitute for Dom Perignon to ring in the New Year for 2012.

According to Peifer, Weihenstephan would like to brew the Infinium several times during the course of the year, exporting it to 41 countries (basically, all the world except for the U.S. and Canada). He said that he’d like to work with Koch and Boston Beer Co. again, but added, “The next time, the beer will be something entirely new.”

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) is the federal agency that regulates alcoholic beverage labeling. Title 27 of the Code of Federal Regulations spells out, in sometimes nitpicking detail, what you may print on a beer label, what you may not print and what you must print (and in what typeface, print size and color).

The Devil is in the Details

Uncle Sam frowns on even the slightest deviations. Epic Ales, a microbrewery in Seattle, WA, had a label disallowed because the mandatory warning statement (the one about alcohol impairing your ability to drive or operate heavy machinery) lacked a period.

In grammar school, a mispunctuated sentence might get you a rap on the knuckles from your teacher. But for a recent start-up trying to get its products on the market, far worse is a delay of weeks (or months) until a revised label can be submitted.

There are certain statements that the TTB clearly and unequivocally forbids. You can’t say that beer has any health benefits. Stating that your beer contains vitamins or minerals (even if backed up by laboratory analysis) is considered a de facto health claim and not allowed. (But the TTB will permit you to list the protein, carbohydrate and fat content.)

Terms that bespeak of high alcohol content, like “strong” or “high test,” are also verboten. The original label for Tuppers’ Hop Pocket Ale was disallowed because it contained the phrase “powerfully hopped.” Apparently, the feds neither knew nor cared that hops have no influence on the alcoholic content of a beer.

What vexes brewers, however, are arbitrary decisions over matters not mentioned in the regs. “They don’t always set out their expectations in clear terms,” says Cody Morris, brewer/manager of Epic Ales, which in its brief lifetime (construction began in December 2008) has already accumulated a stack of rejections. His label for Terra-saurus was shot down because of the description “a meaty ale.” Notes Morris: “They rejected it because they thought ‘meaty’ implied I put meat in my beers.” (His Terra-saurus does contain one unusual ingredient—shiitake mushrooms—but no meat.) Morris changed “meaty” to “toothy” and the TTB nixed that adjective as well as a “non-accepted term.”

A second label, for a spiced ale called Solar Trans-amplifier, was rejected because of the phrase “an invigorating ale.” The TTB gave the thumbs down on a third label, for a coffee and cardamom-flavored brew called OTTO-Optimizer, because the label described it as “swarthy.”

Finally, a frustrated Morris submitted paperwork for a product called Simple Ale, whose label is printed in a generic black and white with simple block lettering and no extraneous designs. That one sailed through.

The whole thing makes you want to crawl up in a fetal position on a sack of malt,” sighs Morris.

Mind Your Design

The TTB’s labeling code also specifies what designs you can and can’t display on the label. Anything obscene is forbidden. You’re also not allowed to print a crest, coat-of-arms or insignia if it might falsely imply an endorsement from an individual or group using that symbol.

Brian Owens, brewer for O’Fallon Brewery in O’Fallon, MO, recently had a label for his Hemp Hop Rye beer rejected because it had a picture of a spiky-leaved hemp plant. “They said you can’t advertise a controlled substance,” he says  of the TTB’s response. Although it’s legal to import sterilized hempseed (as long as contains no more than traces of the psychoactive chemical THC), you can’t grow hemp in any form. “Oddly enough, we had to take the picture of the healthiest ingredient off the label,” commented Owens.

You’d think that it would be safe to display the American flag on your label.

And you’d be wrong.

In the early 1990s, Jack Joyce of Rogue Ales in Newport, OR, submitted his American Amber Ale for label approval. The government rejected the label, which showed an Uncle Sam-like figure hoisting a beer with the American flag fluttering in the background. Rogue, it seems, had run afoul of U.S. Code Title 4, Chapter 8, Item 1: “The U.S. flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever.” So Joyce redesigned the label to portray a generic pattern of red and white stripes with a single row of stars as a border.

However, he continued to use the flag design for glasses, T-shirts, tap handles, etc. until 2005, when a TTB agent, vacationing in Oregon, spotted a Rogue truck painted with the original logo. Ordered to cease and desist, Joyce repainted his trucks and destroyed or gave away between $15,000 and $25,000 worth of promotional items. He was able to salvage his tap handles by painting out the stars. “We solved that by basically desecrating the flag,” he observed ironically.

The prohibition against the flag’s use in ads is meant to keep consumers from thinking that the government endorses products. At least, that’s what the U.S. Department of the Treasury said at the time of the controversy. But the national code for displaying the flag, in effect since 1923, cites another reason for not depicting the Stars and Stripes on a beer label: The flag’s image should never be used on items that are customarily used once and tossed into the garbage, like napkins or candy wrappers. Trashing even a picture of the flag is considered an insult to Old Glory. Technically, postage stamps that portray the flag are also a violation.

But even though the United States Postal Service gets a free pass, Joyce declined to protest the TTB’s decision. “Ours is not to reason why, ours is to comply,” he says, noting gratefully that the government did not exercise its option to fine him $70 for every item that violated the code.

Just because the TTB grants you its approval, that doesn’t mean you’re cleared to sell your beer from coast to coast. “We’ve had more trouble with the states than with the federal government,” grouses Dan Shelton of Shelton Brothers importers in Belchertown, MA. One of the Shelton’s celebrated tussles involved Les Sans Culottes, a bière de garde from the French brewery Les Choulette. The label features a scene from the Eugène Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People, which commemorates the July 1830 revolution that overthrew King Charles X of France. In the center of the painting is a bare-breasted representation of Miss Liberty holding aloft the French tri-colored flag. Although the original hangs in the Louvre and Miss Liberty’s pose is suppose to have inspired our Statue of Liberty, Maine was one of several states to ban the label, alleging that it contained “an undignified or improper illustration.”

Maine also refused to approve another Shelton product: Santa’s Butt Winter Porter, one of a series of irreverent yuletide beers from the Ridgeway Brewing in Oxfordshire, England. The label portrays Santa squatting on an immense barrel of beer, holding his nice-and-naughty list in his left hand and a foaming mug in his right. The name, notes Dan Shelton, is a pun: “butt” can mean one’s posterior or a barrel containing 108 gallons. “That was the one that caused the real stir,” Shelton says. Maine authorities objected because the image of Santa might appeal to children. “We said that made no sense. A 5- or 6-year-old is not going to be able to purchase a bottle of beer.”

Maine eventually backed down after Shelton, a graduate of Yale Law School, filed a suit with the help of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, attracting national media attention. “We got a lot of hostile mail from people all over the place saying we were going to rot in hell for doing that to Santa Claus,” he says.

However, he adds, “There is such a thing as freedom of commercial speech. We do have rights under the First Amendment.”

That attitude has changed, as collaborations between American craft brewers and their foreign counterparts, marrying Old World traditions and expertise with American ingenuity and creativeness, have become increasingly common.

Highly anticipated is an upcoming collaboration between Boston Beer Co., the nation’s largest craft brewery, and the Weihenstephan Brewery in Freising, Germany, the world’s oldest beer maker (official founding date: 1040). Details on the new beer are incomplete—as of press time in February the parties had yet to even choose a name. But Boston Beer chairman Jim Koch describes it as an uncategorical beer, with a double-digit alcohol content but a Champagne-like effervescence and crispness on the palate, quite unlike a traditional German doppelbock. The brew will undergo multiple fermentations, possibly with both top- and bottom-fermenting yeast strains.

Koch says that their Swedish importer brought him and the head of brewing at Weihenstephan, Dr. Josef Schrädler, together. The former monastery brewery, now run by the Bavarian government, “is the keeper of the world’s oldest brewing tradition,” notes Koch, who adds that he can’t help feeling “something reverential” whenever he climbs the hillside that leads to the brewery. But, he continues, “that technical expertise is focused on perfecting what has already been done for a long time. My suggestion was, let’s develop an entirely new style within the confines of the Reinheitsgebot, something radically different.”

The groundbreaking beer will be brewed in both countries, and corked bottles should appear on the market sometime in spring 2010. “It’s been an energizing experience for the both of us,” says Koch.

In the meantime, SBS Imports in Seattle has released the third beer in its Brewmaster’s Collaboration series: Van Twee, a co-production of John Mallett of Bell’s Brewery and Dirk Naudts of Belgium’s De Proef brewery. It’s described as “a deep amber-chocolate colored porter-dubbel hybrid, with Michigan sour cherry juice and Brettanomyces in the secondary fermentation.” SBS president Alan Shapiro notes that De Proef is always the host, but he rotates the American partner by region. Next year head brewer Spike Buckowski of Terrapin Beer Co. in Athens, GA, will collaborate on what Shapiro describes as “an imperial Flanders red.”

Still another joint effort brought together Jean-Marie Rock, brewmaster at the Belgian Trappist brewery Orval, with Steven Pauwels of Boulevard Brewing Co. in Kansas City, MO. The two met in late October to craft a limited-release, Saaz hop-accented imperial pilsner. The beer will be released in early 2010 as part of Boulevard’s Smokestack series of one-off specialty beers.

For Rock, the collaboration gave him an opportunity to recreate a recipe from his youth at the long-defunct Lamot brewery, and to observe the U.S. craft-brewing scene. Pauwels said he learned a lot about a European brewing technique called first wort hopping, in which hops are added during the lautering process, before the beer is transferred to the brewkettle. This early hopping is supposed to produce a subtle, floral aroma in the finished beer.

The project also gave the two Belgians (Pauwels hails from a village called Eeklo between Brugge and Ghent) a chance to rekindle a cameraderie that had been forged at the 2001 Craft Brewers Conference in Portland, OR. “It’s us against the big guys. We’re in the same camp,” laughed Pauwels.

Let’s start with Kirin Ichiban over a bowl of miso soup and teriyaki chicken. Named after a mythical creature said to bring good luck, Kirin is a German-style lager that originated in Japan in 1888. But the fine print on our bottle reads, “Brewed under the strict supervision of Kirin’s brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch, Inc. in Los Angeles, CA.” Anheuser-Busch, however, is a subsidiary of AB InBev, an international conglomerate headquartered in Leuven and run by a native of Rio de Janeiro named Carlos Brito. So what is Kirin… Japanese, American, Belgian or Brazilian?

Let’s move on to Blue Moon Belgian White. The label identifies the manufacturer as “Blue Moon Brewing Co.” in Golden, CO, but that’s just a corporate pseudonym for Coors Brewing Co. Coors is a division of Molson Coors Brewing Co., the result of a 2005 merger between the third largest U.S. brewer and the second largest Canadian brewer. Since that time, Blue Moon has been brewed on both sides of the border. In 2007, Molson Coors entered into a joint venture with SABMiller, a London-based company with roots in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Johannesburg, South Africa. Ironically, Belgium appears to be the only country not involved here. In 1999 the Confederation of Belgian Brewers sued Coors, arguing that the term “Belgian White” misled consumers about the origin of the beer.

How about a nightcap of Three Philosophers from the Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, NY? Since 2003, Belgium’s Duvel Moortgat Brewery has wholly owned this bucolic farmhouse operation. Three Philosophers consists of a strong, malty quadrupel-style ale brewed in upstate New York blended with Liefmans Kriek from the Liefmans Brewery in Oudenaarde, Belgium, which Duvel Moortgat recently rescued from bankruptcy. Can a beer have dual citizenship?

Kingfisher Premium Lager? Glance at the label the next time you enjoy this popular Indian import with chicken vindaloo, and you’ll learn that it’s brewed under license at the Olde Saratoga Brewing Co. in Saratoga Springs, NY, or at Mendocino Brewing Co. in Hopland, CA. Both breweries are owned by the Bangalore, India-based United Breweries.

Labatt Blue? The best-selling Canadian import in theUnited States is owned by the New York investment firm KPS Capital Partners, LP, which set up a subsidiary called North American Breweries to run Labatt USA and the Genesee Brewing Co. in Rochester, NY.

Conversely, what used to be the Joseph Huber Brewing Co. in Monroe, WI, is now owned by a Calgary businessman named Ravinder Minhas and renamed Minhas Craft Brewery.

International borders count for little in this new era of brewing.

Big Brands Get The Budget Cut

And like the big domestic brands, big-name imports are tanking in post-economic meltdown America. Imports are down nearly 10 percent in barrelage through September, according to the Beer Institute. Familiar names like Foster’s Lager, Amstel Light, Bass Ale, Pilsner Urquell, Moosehead and Grolsch have seen U.S. sales drop by double digits. Fewer Americans are drinking Guinness (down 5 percent), in spite of the hoopla surrounding the brewer’s 250th anniversary, which included the introduction of a special anniversary beer and a series of concerts worldwide.

The conventional wisdom is that financially pinched beer drinkers are trading down from $8 six-packs of green and clear bottles to budget brands like Keystone Light. There just isn’t enough difference in flavor to justify paying for a beer’s boat ride across the ocean.

It’s a little more complicated for Corona and Heineken, the lead brands dragging down the whole pack. “The old guard has been caught off guard,” comments beer industry consultant Bump Williams. He cites a number of factors, ranging from import pricing being “out of whack” to the desertion of former Corona spokesman Jimmy Buffett to hawk Anheuser-Busch’s Land Shark brand. He also mentions that the soft economy has prompted the exodus of minorities who consumed a great deal of Corona. “It costs them more money to live here as opposed to a year-and-a-half ago when they were sending money home.”

But just as domestic beer is buoyed by a craft beer segment (up 5 percent in spite of the recession), the import segment has its bright spots. “Our sales are up,” comments Craig Hartinger, marketing manager for Merchant du Vin, the Tukwila, WA-based company that imports Samuel Smith’s ales, Lindemans lambics, the gluten-free Green’s Belgian-style beers and numerous other brands. “There ought to be a category called craft imports,” he asserts. But no one has attempted to define such a category, let alone tabulate barrels.

Supply and Demand

It appears counter-intuitive that in the midst of a recession consumers would be splurging on the priciest segment of the beer industry, but Steve Cardello floats the idea of beer as an affordable luxury. “If you ask what you can buy with a ten spot, merchants who sell gourmet cheese, Scotch and cigars will laugh you out of their stores,” comments Cardello, market manager for Duvel Moortgat USA. “You can’t even buy a boxed wine for that price. But you can go out and buy a 750-mililiter bottle of one of the best beers on the planet for $10.”

Cardello notes that bottle sales of Duvel, the archetypal Belgian strong pale ale, are up 8 percent. In spite of dwindling on-premise sales as customers opt to eat and drink at home, the draft-only Duvel Green is doing almost as well. This lighter cousin of Duvel (6.8 percent ABV, as opposed to 8.5 percent) is made from the same ingredients but doesn’t undergo the secondary fermentation that Duvel undergoes in the bottle. “Because of the intense pressure that builds up, the kegs would explode,” elaborates Cardello. “A draft presence is a must,” he continues. “The first thing I do when I’m at a bar is look at the taps long before I look at the bottle listing.”

It’s clear that many beer connoisseurs are equal-opportunity buyers of flavorful and quirky beers, regardless of their point of origin.

We’re talking about breweries that have pushed the alcohol content of beer past 20 percent by volume, through the process of fermentation alone.

Just as enriching uranium 235 to build an atom bomb requires a considerable degree of technological prowess, so does coaxing yeast into frenzied acts of metabolism that nature never intended.

Both accomplishments carry a heightened degree of responsibility. Nuclear weapons could cause mayhem if they fell into the hands of terrorists. And super strong beers could also provoke mischief if unsuspecting drinkers downed them at the same rate they would a Bud or Miller. These leviathans of the malt beverage world have to be packaged, priced and marketed differently from normal beers. Drinkers have to be educated to enjoy them a few ounces at a time, the way they would an after-dinner shot of some fine brandy.

But there is one key difference: there are probably more nations with nuclear weapons than there are breweries that have surpassed the 20 percent ABV mark.

Alcohol is a byproduct of yeast’s digestion of sugar, and yeast can no more live in their own waste product than human beings could thrive in a room filled with carbon dioxide. The average brewer’s yeast cannot survive in a concentration of much more than 10 percent alcohol, states Neva Parker, lab manager for White Labs, a leading provider of yeast to craft brewers. At higher levels, reproduction halts, followed by failure of other metabolic functions. In the pre-scientific era, she doubts that even the most potent barley wines and doppelbocks measured more than 10-12 percent alcohol. Modern science, stresses Parker, can isolate and propagate strains that have a high tolerance for alcohol, and establish a brewing regimen to coax these yeasts into giving their all. But it’s a labor-intensive process requiring skill and patience.

Nowhere Beer

Boston Beer Co. has crossed the 20 percent threshold six times, once with Samuel Adams Millennium (a one-shot brand released in 2000) and four additional times with the 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2007 vintages of Samuel Adams Utopias. The 2007 release, measuring 25.6 percent ABV, earned a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records for the world’s strongest commercially available beer.

New Belgium Brewing Co., Fort Collins, CO

There are subtle but noticeable differences between the bottled and canned versions of this much-sought after brand. The bottled Fat Tire pours a brilliantly clear copper color. The canned version, which contains a small amount of live yeast, has a slight haze. Bottled Fat Tire has a biscuity, toffeeish sweetness, followed by a short burst of hops in the finish and a faint whiff of burnt toast. Fat Tire from the cans also has these flavors, plus a soft, lemony fruitiness. Regardless of which container you enjoy it from, this is a well-balanced, quaffable session beer. –GK

Moose Drool

Big Sky Brewing Co., Missoula, MT

“Moose Drool” is an unappetizing name for a very appetizing beer, mahogany brown in color and gentle but refreshing. This brown ale bears more similarity to the English Newcastle Brown than to hoppier American versions of the style, although at 5.1 percent it’s slightly stronger than the Newcastle. Moose Drool has notes of chocolate caramel, brown sugar and molasses and a bit of roast in the finish. It used to be marketed in 16-ounce aluminum bottles but now is available in standard 12-ounce cans. The brewery also packages the citrusy Trout Slayer Wheat in aluminum. –GK

Caldera IPA

Caldera Brewing Co., Ashland, OR

The aroma, full of grapefruit and pine sap, screams Pacific Northwest hops. I don’t know if it is the hoppiest beer available in cans—Oskar Blues’ Gordon might give it a run for its money—but it should please fans of West Coast IPAs. Munich and crystal malt provide a sweet, toffeeish backdrop to this deep amber ale with the thick, clingy white foam. The beer comes from a tiny microbrewery: Caldera Brewing made just over 2,200 barrels last year, but it ships its beers (it also cans its pale and amber ales) as far away as Virginia, Maryland, Washington, DC and Puerto Rico. –GK

Mama’s Little Yella Pils

Oskar Blues, Longmont, CO

Straw gold in color, Mama’s Little Yella Pils has the peppery aroma characteristic of Saaz hops against a dry, crackery, malty background. At 5.3 percent alcohol by volume, it’s Oskar Blues’ lightest canned offering to date, the antithesis of the black-as-pitch, roasty Ten Fidy Imperial Stout. According to brewery spokesman Marty Jones, the pils was released as a spring/summer seasonal but might be promoted to year-around beer if sales warrant. “There aren’t many all-malt pilsners in cans,” notes Jones. Off the bat, we can think of only Pilsner Ukiah from California’s Ukiah Brewing Co. and the Pikeland Pils from the Sly Fox Brewing Co. in Pennsylvania. –GK

Third Eye Pale Ale

Steamworks Brewing Co., Durango, CO

The can features an emerald-colored figure who might be a cousin of the Jolly Green Giant, and at first glance this appears to be a container for lima beans or creamed corn. But pop open the top and you’re greeted by the familiar pine/citrus aroma of a solid example of the American pale ale style. There are softer, subtler notes of peach, a toffeeish sweetness and a slightly herbal finish. The brewery also cans its Steam Engine Lager. –GK

Big Swell IPA

Maui Brewing Co., Lahaina, HI

Pours a slightly cloudy golden color. Aromas of fragrant citrus, pine and baking bread. The medium-bodied beer is full of apricots, pine resin, and English Kent Golding hops. Finishes with long, iron-like bitterness—a real American-style IPA. –Staff

Porkslap Pale Ale

Butternuts Beer and Ale, Garrattsville, NY

Confusingly, the can is labeled “Farmhouse Ale,” but that tag describes the brewery—which is on a farm—rather than a beer style. This pale ale pours amber tinged with green. Restrained aroma of sweet malt. Toasty flavors, prickly carbonation, and notes of nutmeg, spice cake and ginger ale. Crisp finish. –Staff

Hell or High Watermelon Wheat Beer

21st Amendment Brewery, San Francisco, CA

Straw-colored with a scant head. Fruity, sweet aroma, though not specifically watermelon. The flavor, though, is of Jolly Rancher watermelon candy and strawberry birthday cake with vanilla icing. Slightly slippery mouthfeel and a birthday cake finish. –Staff

666 Devil’s Pale Ale

Great Lakes Brewing, Toronto, ON

Devil’s Pale Ale refers to the accursed number 666 in the kilos of malt (666), kilos of hops (6.66), date of conception (6/6/06)—you get the picture. This pours the color of tea: pale it’s not. Sweet, malty aroma. Medium mouthfeel, with round, roasty malt and a touch of citrus. Sturdy, bitter finish, metallic and rough at the edges, but enjoyable. A working man’s pale ale. –Staff

Ram’s Head IPA

Top of the Hill Brewery & Restaurant, Chapel Hill, NC

Pours bright amber with a fine, tight head. Aromas of spicy hops and caramel. Big, malty flavor with lots of ripe fruit, balanced with hop spiciness. Finish is long and dryly bitter, with aromatic celery notes. –Staff

Brooklyn Lager

Brooklyn Brewing Co., Brooklyn, NY

Clear, golden beer with tight head. Aroma of honeycomb and pine. Clean flavors of slightly toasted malt, tart apple and fresh bread. Subtle finish: smooth, undemanding and very satisfying. –Staff

Brew Free or Die IPA

21st Amendment Brewery, San Francisco, CA

Hazy pale golden color. Orange peel citrus aroma. Orange hard candy and marmalade, tangerine candy, fruit drops. On the sour side of the spectrum. Pine resin. Finish is more like a pale ale, astringent and lightly bitter. –Staff

Bikini Blonde Lager

Maui Brewing Co., Lahaina, HI

Pale gold color, lemon and banana taffy nose. Full mouthfeel for a helles, hints of minerals and gypsum, sweet malt and lemon bread. Floral finish and a bit sweet. Clean and refreshing. –Staff

A bonanza for beer connoisseurs?

There’s a catch: ask for a beer and you’ll get handed a can wearing a plastic cup. The Red Derby offers no draft or bottled beer: it’s strictly aluminum.

Should you feel deprived? Not all. If you’re in the mood for big, citrusy Pacific Northwest hops, try Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues in Longmont, CO, or Sea Hag IPA from New England Brewing Co. in Woodbridge, CT. If you prefer a drink that’s malty and rich and smooth, pop open an Oskar Blues’ Old Chub, a first-class Scotch ale. Moo Thunder, from Butternuts Beer and Ale in Garrattsville, NY, is a dry stout that delivers everything you like about Guinness and more. For fans of imports, the menu includes Wittekerke, a Belgian white ale, and Baltik 5, a golden lager from Russia.

Increasingly, any type of beer you can get in a bottle you can get in a can as well. “We’re constantly hounding our reps for anything new in cans,” says Red Derby owner Dave Leventry. “They load so much easier than bottles,” he comments. “And draft beer? You don’t realize how much space you need to run a draft system!”

Cans tend to be cheaper than other packages, he adds, enabling him to offer 12 ounce pours of many better beers for $4, quite cheap by the standards of this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

Marty Jones also sings the praises of canned beer… literally. The self-described “lead singer and idea man” for Oskar Blues and Brian O’Reilly of the Sly Fox (another canning microbrewery) performed a duet during Philly Beer Week to the tune of “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing”:

Cans are a many splendored thing

‘Cause they keep beer fresh the very best from bad, bad things

No UV light can touch it, no oxygen can stale it

A double seam no bottle cap can match…

Getting Canned

It’s been seven years since Oskar Blues became the first U.S. microbrewery to operate a canning line, and the taboos against packaging better beer in cans have fallen fast and hard. Oskar Blues followed up its initial efforts with even bigger beers, including an imperial IPA dubbed Gordon (Jones describes it as a “double red,” but that’s a minor stylistic quibble) and an imperial stout named Ten Fidy, perhaps the strongest (10 percent alcohol by volume) and darkest beer ever packaged in aluminum containers.

For its latest effort, Oskar Blues has gone in the opposite direction, releasing a quaffable Czech-style pilsner under the brand name Mama’s Little Yella Pils. The introduction was delayed, reports Jones, because of a labeling tussle with the federal Tax and Trade Bureau. Regulators disallowed the statement “Take two and call us in the morning” as well as the admonition “Pop this!” Reflects Jones: “They stripped the can of all its fun! We need more humor at the federal level.”

Sly Fox, which operates a brewpub/canning facility in Royersford, PA, has also been breaking new ground. The brewery’s Pikeland Pils won a gold medal in the German-style Pilsner category at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival in Denver. “We didn’t do anything special with it, we just sent along a six-pack of cans,” says manager of brewery operations Tim Ohst.

Sly Fox is currently hatching plans to become the first American brewery to package beer (its O’Reilly’s Stout) in 16-ounce “widget” cans. This type of package, introduced to the United States by Guinness in 1991, contains a plastic cartridge into which some beer and nitrogen gas is forced under pressure. When the top is punched in and the pressure released, the gas streams out rapidly, roiling the beer and creating the rich, creamy head of foam typical of a draft stout.

“It’ll be quite an undertaking,” promises Ohst. The brewery will have to order the cans from a European manufacturer who sells them in minimum lots of around 500,000. The brew crew also will have to rig up a liquid nitrogen drip to inject the gas into the can. But if all goes well, Ohst hopes to have the cans on the market by St. Patrick’s Day 2010.

Meanwhile, in Santa Cruz, CA, a microbrewery called Uncommon Brewers is living up to its name by marketing the first Belgian-style abbey ale in a can. This quirky little operation is one of numerous startups that have elected to sidestep bottling and proceed directly to canning. Brewery president Alec Stefansky has jerry-rigged a mash tun from an old industrial butter churn and uses a two-head manual canner mounted to a surplus schoolteacher’s desk. “We’re operating without a glycol system,” he relates. “Everything’s fermenting at whatever temperature it wants to ferment at.”

Uncommon Brewers’ first canned release is Siamese Twin Ale, which Stefansky describes as a dubbel spiced with coriander, lemongrass and kaffir lime… a classic Belgian style with traditional Thai seasonings. He hopes to follow that up with Golden State Ale, a strong golden ale flavored with poppy seeds, and a Baltic porter brewed with star anise and licorice.

Other microbrewers are canning similarly uncategorical beers. Surly Brewing Co. in Brooklyn Center, MN, recently debuted 16-ounce cans of Coffee Bender, an American brown ale/porter hybrid dosed with locally roasted Guatemalan coffee. The 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco offers 12-ounce cans of its watermelon wheat ale.

One wonders what else American craft brewers will introduce to the market by the time the 75th anniversary of the beer can rolls around on January 24, 2010.

No Respect

It was in 1935, less than two years after the end of Prohibition, that the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Co. in Newark, NJ. became the first brewery to offer beer—specifically its Krueger Cream Ale—in cans. The original beer cans, manufactured by the American Can Co. in Greenwich, CT, were made of steel and weighed nearly four ounces. They had a flat metal top that had to be perforated with an unwieldy can opener called a “church key” because it resembled the oversized keys that sextants would carry. (The easy-open cans we know today were nearly 40 years in the future. Not until 1962 did the Pittsburgh Brewing Co. release Iron City cans with a pull tab that could be easily peeled off.)

To prevent the beer from reacting with the steel to form foul-tasting metallic salts, the American Can Co, coated the insides of the cans with a plastic lining it trademarked as “vinyllite.” Krueger apparently had some trepidation, as they chose to debut the new package in Richmond, VA, a minor beer market on the fringe of its territory. But the public embraced the beer can, and by the end of 1935, nearly two dozen American brewers (including some sizable companies like Schlitz) were marketing some type of can.

It wasn’t until 1969, however, the year of the moon landing and Woodstock, that cans surpassed bottles in popularity. That year more than 18 billion beer cans rolled off packaging lines. By that point, the pull tap had become an industry standard and Coors had switched to aluminum, a lighter, less reactive metal that would eventually replace steel as the preferred material for cans.

And yet this workhorse of a container still got little respect. It was associated with bulk commodities like tomato paste and baked beans, not connoisseurs’ beverages.

By the mid-1990s a few craft brewers were contract-canning some of their beer at older regional breweries with canning lines. Generally, however, they only packaged more mass-market styles, like amber lager and golden ale, in cans, and limited sales to venues like golf courses and sports stadiums that prohibited glass.

Boston Beer Co. briefly marketed a Samuel Adams Cream Ale in cans in Great Britain, but company founder Jim Koch has resisted canning his beers for the American market, asserting that even minor breaks in the can’s lining can result in the beer acquiring an unpleasant metallic twang. Other brewers, while not impugning the quality of canned beer, felt that it just didn’t fit the image they wanted to project.

But there was an element of sour grapes in their putdowns. Canning lines were expensive, high maintenance pieces of equipment. Cans were sold in bulk, several million units at a time. Canning was simply beyond the means of most craft breweries.

Yes You Can

A Calgary-based company called Cask Brewing Systems leveled the playing field in 1999 by introducing a manually operated canner with a two-head filler and single-head seamer that was small enough to fit on a tabletop. It cost under $10,000, compared to the quarter of a million that a high-speed canning line might set you back. “When we first started displaying it at trade shows, people thought we were nuts,” recalls company president Peter Love.

Oskar Blues, a Lyons, CO, brewpub, agreed to become the first U.S. customer in 2002. In the intervening years, the company has seen its output increase from about 700 barrels annually to nearly 20,000 barrels in 2008. Last year, Oskar Blues inaugurated a brand new 35,000 square-foot production facility in Longmont, CO. You can buy their beers in 23 states. And they’ve graduated from that labor-intensive early model to a Chinese machine that can fill 150 cans a minute. “We’ve increased our canning speed 500 percent,” notes Jones.

Cask Brewing’s clients now number about 40 U.S. breweries, from Sleeping Lady Brewing Co. in Alaska to Maui Brewing Co. in Hawaii, from Caldera Brewing Co. in Oregon to Coastal Extreme Brewing Co. in Rhode Island. One of their most recent customers is Anderson Valley Brewing Co. in Boonville, CA. The brewery, well-known for brands like Poleeko Gold, Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout and Hop Ottin IPA, was in the process of deciding which of its beers to can as we went to press.

Breweries cite different reasons for getting into cans. Some appreciate the fact that the can is opaque to all light, and won’t admit UV rays that would break down hop compounds and give the beer an unpleasant “skunky” aroma. Others are won over by the can’s compactness and lightness. Bjorn Nabozney, cofounder of Big Sky Brewing Co. in Missoula, MT, notes that a case of cans weighs only about 20 pounds, compared to 35 pounds for a case of glass bottles. Breweries with a strong green ethic will cite the recyclability of cans. According to the Can Manufacturers Institute, more than half of all aluminum cans are recycled, and recycling saves 95 percent of the energy used to manufacture the cans from raw ore.

Still another major reason is the sheer novelty of better beer in cans. With about 1,400 craft breweries operating in the United States, and probably not many more than 50 canning, a lot of markets are under-served… or not served at all.

“We were getting calls from all over the state,” says assistant brewer George Dusek of Top of the Hill Restaurant and Brewery in Chapel Hill, NC, in regard to cans of their Leaderboard Trophy Lager and Rams Head IPA. “At one point a guy from Knoxville, TN, said our beer was there. We have no idea how it got there!”

Dusek said Top of the Hill has had to cut back drastically on canning in order to have enough beer to sell over the bar. They’ve dropped their outside accounts, but you can still buy six-packs at the brewpub. “I think the demand is there,” he adds. “It’d be super to build a whole new brewery to satisfy that demand, but you can’t justify it in this economy.”

Who’s Next?

Until recently, most canning was done either by the megabreweries or tiny brewpubs and microbreweries. There didn’t seem to be much interest among mid-sized operations. That changed dramatically in 2008 when New Belgium Brewing Co. in Fort Collins, CO, began packaging its flagship Fat Tire Amber Ale in 12-ounce aluminum cans.

According to media relations director Bryan Simpson, New Belgium is using a German machine capable of filling 60 cans per minute. By contrast, the brewery’s bottling line does 700 containers a minute. “It’s almost cozy to see the canning line operate!” he laughs. Simpson doesn’t see cans—a second beer, Sunshine Wheat, was set to join Fat Tire in aluminum this spring—accounting for more than 2-3 percent of New Belgium’s volume anywhere in the near future.

Interestingly, the canned version of Fat Tire is not identical to the bottled version. New Belgium was worried about the oxygen pickup of the cans, Simpson explains, so the brewery adds a dollop of yeast slurry to the cans before they’re sealed. The idea is that the yeast cells will consume the oxygen in the head of the can, preventing it from reacting with the beer and giving it a stale, cardboardy flavor. This is not done with the bottled Fat Tire.

An expert panel of tasters, insists Bryan, sampled both versions and could detect no discernible difference. But a minority opinion, he admits, holds that the canned version of Fat Tire has a slightly richer mouthfeel.

Earlier this spring, another sizable microbrewery, Boulevard Brewing Co. in Kansas City, MO, announced that as of April 1 it would release its best-selling Unfiltered Wheat Beer in 16-ounce aluminum bottles from the EXAL Corporation in Youngstown, OH. These containers resemble the old “conetop” cans, which were in use from 1935 through the late 1950s and which are highly prized by can collectors today. But they’re sleeker, lighter, and fabricated out of a single piece of metal, so that the spout doesn’t have to be welded to the body of the can.

Boulevard’s director of marketing Jerry Ragonese said that the aluminum bottles will open up new markets such as golf courses, parks, outdoor concerts and other venues where fear of broken glass makes standard bottles unwelcome. Also, the new containers can be filled on a standard bottling line with minor adjustments. “They’re expensive, but they’re worth it,” maintains Ragonese.

If the can is the new frontier for craft brewing, there’s still a lot of unstaked territory. Who will be the first to market a barley wine in cans? A Belgian-style framboise? An American wild ale?

The bottleneck is demand. Cask Brewing Systems acts as a broker between its clients and the Ball Corporation, the country’s largest manufacturer of cans. It’s whittled down the minimum order to 25 pallets, or 155,000 cans. But that’s still a big investment to sit on if your beer is going to sell in dribs and drabs.

What’s more, the cans arrive pre-painted, so you can only use them for a single brand. Theoretically, it’s possible to buy unpainted cans and slap adhesive labels on them. That’s what Oskar Blues did with its first run of Gordon. But it’s tedious grunt work, advises Marty Jones, and is best avoided.

While we wait for barley wine in cans, another barrier is being leveled. According to Jones, elegant restaurants are considering the merits of beer in cans. He cites Duo Restaurant, a Denver bistro offering seasonal American cuisine whose pastry chef was recently named a semi-finalist for a prestigious James Beard Foundation award.

“Many people feel it’s the best restaurant in Denver, and they carry three or four of our beers,” comments Jones. “Some restaurants think cans are gauche, they want tap handles. But these guys have no reservations about putting our cans down on a white tablecloth aside world-class food.”

Liquor stores, supermarkets, groceries and corner delis all can sell beer…and many stock at least a few craft beer selections. (I’ve seen Sierra Nevada Celebration pop up in CVS drug stores.)

Bear in mind that in most DC neighborhoods, regulations forbid selling individual bottles or cans to go, on the pretext that such sales encourage drinking in public and littering. Ward 3 is unaffected, however, and that’s where you’ll find Chevy Chase Wine & Spirits (5544 Connecticut Ave. NW) with its selection of between 1,000 and 1,200 beers. Other well-stocked retailers include Rodman’s (5100 Wisconsin Ave. NW) and Cairo Liquors (1618 17th Street NW).

The epicenter of the DC beer scene is the Brickskeller (1523 22nd St. NW), famed for its menu of over 1,000 beers, buffalo burgers and collection of antique beer cans. The Brick has been hosting beer tastings and dinners since 1985. In 2003, owners Dave and Diane Alexander opened up RFD (Regional Food and Drink) (810 7th St. NW) in DC’s bustling Chinatown neighborhood, where larger kitchen facilities allow them to experiment more extensively with beer cuisine.

In Georgetown, stop by Pizzeria Paradiso (3282 M Street NW) for its 80 bottled and 16 draft selections. The downstairs bar Birreria Paradiso is the setting for monthly beer dinners.

“DC is the most important Belgian beer market in the United States by far,” insists Martin Wetten, of Wetten Importers and Hop & Wine distributors. Brasserie Beck (1101 K Street NW), with 11 draft and 150 bottled Belgians, its 20-foot high ceiling and elegant marble and walnut bar, is the place to visit “when you’re feeling saucy [and] want to dress up and drink up,” according to one on-line critic. Other destinations where you can savor a Trappist ale alongside mussels and frites include Belga Cafe (514 8th Street SE), Et Voila (5120 MacArthur Blvd. NW) and the less formal Granville Moore’s (1238 H Street NE), named for a doctor who used to occupy the townhouse where the restaurant is situated.

Columbia Heights is a neighborhood that was deeply scarred by the riots of 1968 but has been thoroughly transformed by a building boom that followed the opening of a subway station on Metro’s Green Line. Barely 20 paces from the station is CommonWealth Gastropub (1400 Irving Street NW), a British-themed restaurant that offers Yorkshire pudding, ploughman’s lunch and Scotch egg, along with a well-chosen draft list of UK and American beers. (Domestic selections come from Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, three of four states that call themselves “commonwealths.”)

Southeast boasts The Tune Inn (331 ½ Pennsylvania Ave SE), a dive bar with deer heads mounted on the walls. It’s a working class bar in Capitol Hill where James Carville took Mary Matalan on their first date. Another legendary watering hole amongst the political and journalistic cognoscenti is the Old Ebbitt Grill (675 15th Street NW). This Victorian-style saloon is just a short walk from the White House and has been a favorite of presidents over the years.

If you’re the literary type, browse through the beer menu at Kramerbooks and the Afterwords Café (1517 Connecticut Avenue NW), which offers 17 drafts and a few exotic bottled offering like Allagash Curieux Barrel-Aged Tripel.

If you look at a map of the District of Columbia, it resembles a diamond with a big bite out of the lower left corner. Congress, for a variety of reasons, in 1847 returned that land to the State of Virginia, where it now comprises the suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria. For pizza and sandwiches, try the Lost Dog Cafe (5876 Washington Blvd.) in Arlington with its immense bottled beer list (the deli offers sixpacks and bottles to go), or for a somewhat more formal setting visit Bilbo Baggins and the Green Dragon Pub (10 taps, 80 bottles) at 208 Queen Street in Alexandria’s cobblestoned Old Town neighborhood.

If you’re on a budget, enjoy the chili (four kinds, including vegetarian) at the Hard Times Cafe chain, with over a dozen branches scattered throughout the Virginia and Maryland suburbs. They all have a few good taps, including a house beer brewed by Baltimore’s Clipper City Brewing. The Ballston Commons Mall at 4238 Wilson Blvd. in Arlington numbers among its tenants a Bailey’s Pub and Grill, Rock Bottom Brewery and Union Jack’s, all of whom have weekly specials where you can get a decent mug of beer for as little as a buck or two.

Worthy of special mention is Rustico (827 Slaters Lane in Alexandria), which earned Washingtonian magazine’s award for best beer selection of any restaurant not the Brickskeller. As of press time, that selection included 300-350 bottles, 30 drafts and a cask ale. Chef Frank Morales is noted for innovative cuisine that includes wood-fired pizzas, pot pies and (during the summer months) frozen beer pops.

Morales and his beer director Greg Engert have announced that they’re opening a companion restaurant at 1443 14th Street in Washington, DC. Birch & Barley will offer 500 bottled beers, 80 drafts and 5 cask ales at all times. The restaurant will include an upstairs bar called the ChurchKey and a rooftop deck for the warmer weather. Grand opening is expected in March.