The cover of the September 2013 issue of All About Beer Magazine.

Chief Oshkosh Red Lager was about to go national. It had found a distribution and marketing partner, and was ready to bust out of Wisconsin. Jeff Fulbright, the founder and president of the brewing company behind Chief Oshkosh, Mid-Coast Brewing, excitedly placed the beer in a spectrum that showed both his ambition and confidence.

“The West Coast has Anchor Steam beer, and the East Coast has Samuel Adams beer,” Fulbright said in a statement. “Through this union, we have created a company that has the strength to distinguish our line of beers as a dominant Midwestern representative of the rapidly growing microbeer segment.”

The idea for Fulbright’s company was born of the larger craft beer movement in the late 1980s and 1990s, right before it entered its period of greatest growth. Information still traveled primarily over the telephone or by word of mouth; and it was at a Great American Beer Festival in Denver in the late 1980s that Fulbright ran into Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Co., which itself had gone national a few years before.

Fulbright, then in his mid-30s, with bushy brown hair and a moustache to match, told Koch of his idea to revive the Chief Oshkosh brand in his native Wisconsin. He had checked on the trademark: It was available. The beer had been brewed until 1971 by the Oshkosh Brewing Co., one of many regionals that collapsed amid the post-World War II consolidation in the brewing industry.

Oshkosh Brewing itself had been formed by the 1894 consolidation of three Oshkosh-based breweries nervous about competition from Schlitz and Pabst in nearby Milwaukee, according to Lee Reiherzer of the Oshkosh Beer blog, who first tracked down Fulbright’s story.

Koch suggested that Fulbright brew Chief Oshkosh under contract at an existing brewery, which was what Koch himself was doing for his fast-selling Samuel Adams Boston Lager. Fulbright took Koch’s suggestion back to the Midwest, where he studied brewing at the Siebel Institute in Chicago and incorporated the Mid-Coast Brewing Co. in May 1991.

Its signature beer would be a red lager that Fulbright devised at Siebel and brewed at the Stevens Point Brewery, a regional 70 miles northwest of Oshkosh.

Chief Oshkosh Red Lager hit the local Milwaukee market in 1991, retailing for $3.99 a six-pack. Fulbright lined up coverage on three TV stations in Wisconsin as well as in the consumer and trade media. He reached out to legendary critic Michael Jackson personally as well as to this magazine—Jackson praised the beer for an “unapologetic, robust sweetness” and All About Beer said it was “just delightful.” Distributors signed on, and by the end of 1992, Chief Oshkosh would spread statewide, with those plans to go national following quickly after.

The craft beer was already a hit, when, on June 17, 1991, a Monday, Fulbright hosted a formal unveiling for about 45 people at the Oshkosh Hilton. He and volunteers poured the red lager from cans.

That’s right: cans.

Surprised?

You’re forgiven. The history of canning in American craft beer is drenched in myths. For instance, ask most industry experts, including the brewers themselves, and they would date the advent of craft-beer canning to late 2002, when Dale Katechis decided to can all his Oskar Blues brands, particularly his signature Dale’s Pale Ale. Oskar Blues, out of tiny Lyons, CO, is considered to be the first American craft brewery to can its own beers.

But it wasn’t the first American craft beer sold in a can. (And it wasn’t the first in North America, for that matter, to can its own beers, with that honor belonging to Yukon Gold in Canada’s Yukon Territory in 2001.) Chief Oshkosh Red Lager predates Dale’s Pale Ale by 11 years, as do at least four other domestic offerings: Pete’s Summer Brew from Pete’s Brewing, Wisconsin Amber from Capital Brewery, Brewski Brewing’s Brewski Beer and Iron Range Amber Ale from James Page Brewing—all hit shelves, either regionally or nationally, before 1999, though each was canned on contract by larger companies.

For much more on the myths of canning craft beer, pick up the September issue of All About Beer Magazine.

With the influx of new craft breweries on the scene comes an even greater number of consumer choices, whether it’s the local nanobrewer opening up nearby or a new production facility packaging up specialty offerings and distributing across the country. The shape of what’s ahead (we can probably safely rule out the above übernanobrewery-in-every-garage theory) remains unknown but rather encouraging. It’s been repeatedly suggested by distributors, by craft-beer veterans—by folks with money on the table, in other words—that craft beer is likely headed for 10-15-plus percent market share, at least in due time. (It’s currently around a modest 6 percent.) What would that future beer scene look like?

Long term, it’s anyone’s guess. But perhaps one might gain at least a glimpse of what craft beer’s future holds by looking at faint trends that have already appeared on the horizon. Over the past five years or so, a vibrant group of successful, highly specialized craft breweries—dedicating themselves to Belgian-style ales, or German-style lagers, or “farm-to-bottle beer,” or barrel aging, or Brettanomyces—suggests that future growth, in part, may very well be found within craft beer’s underexplored niches.

King Brett

While it really only gets easier for beer consumers to benefit from the industry’s growth, the flip side is that these up-and-coming breweries face increasing competition: for shelf space at retailers, for tap space at bars, for distribution and even for brewing equipment. Brewers are frequently indicating lengthy lead times for new equipment orders or (just as often) a lack of readily available used equipment. Supply and demand fluctuates, of course, as manufacturers and secondhand markets attempt to adjust to how fast the industry is changing.

Another major constraint is ingredients, says Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association: “If you were trying to start up now and you don’t have a contract for your hops and you’re thinking you’re going to make this killer Cascade IPA, you may not be able to get Cascade for a year until you’re able to contract for the next growing season.” Whether hops or fermentation tanks, supplies are still limited.

One way to avoid some of these constraints is to take paths less-traveled, assuming a different artist tack. Gabe Fletcher, who established a loyal following during his 13-year stint at Midnight Sun Brewing Co. in Anchorage, AK, launched his own brewery, Anchorage Brewing Co., in June 2011 with the telling motto of “Where brewing is an art & Brettanomyces is king.” Anchorage Brewing focuses almost completely on beers fermented with Brettanomyces.

Fletcher’s new operation is currently situated in a concrete warehouse directly underneath the Sleeping Lady Brewing Co. The warehouse contains wooden foeders for aging some of his beers, and his brewing arrangement involves renting Sleeping Lady’s equipment to produce wort before pumping the unfermented liquid into his rented warehouse for multistage fermentation.

By focusing on a yeast-driven approach, Fletcher manages to circumvent some of the ingredient constraints felt by many of the more traditional brewers. Yeasts are comparatively easy to obtain and propagate. Anchorage kegs very little, overhead’s kept to a minimum, and Fletcher’s lineup—including offerings such as Whiteout Wit Bier (triple-fermented and aged in French Chardonnay barrels), Bitter Monk (a Belgian-style double IPA, also with Brett) and Galaxy White IPA (bottled with Brett)—is positioned upon far less-frequented territory.

Speaking of Sleeping Lady’s brewing approach, Fletcher comments, “They would be more of a general [approach]. You know, your IPA, your stout, your pale ale, amber, golden: kind of the core beers a lot of microbreweries go with. But they’ll also do some other really interesting stuff, too: some other Belgians, imperial stouts, barley wines. … But nothing with Brett, no sour beers, and that’s kind of why the owner was OK with me starting downstairs, because [Anchorage Brewing] didn’t compete with their business at all.”

The Galaxy White IPA is what Fletcher has typically made the most of, as its time in production (about three months) is short relative to some of the other Anchorage beers, which can take up to a year and a half from start to finish. That first release of Galaxy, procured early on, showed juicy tropical-fruit hop character and a modest Brett contribution of citrus, along with a mild peppery firmness from peppercorn additions and witbier yeast.

It will gradually show a lessened hop presence with time in the bottle, while the Brettanomyces will continue to develop and take over: a temporal transition Fletcher is artistically drawn to. “It just turns into a completely different beer. I like the journey.”

In his previous position at Midnight Sun, Fletcher had been experimenting with sour beer cultures before 2007, but it wasn’t until then that things started to click. “In ’07, I made a beer called Pride [a Belgian-style strong pale ale]. And that beer sort of changed everything for me as far as working with Brett and figuring out how to make beers taste good through that whole process. I was really, really happy with that beer, and then after that I just kept on adding [Brett] beers to the list that we did until I left. … I guess I sort of saw the niche in the market, and I saw how it was growing. And there were some people doing it, but they weren’t doing it on a big-enough scale to fill much of the market.

“There was never a market before this, you know? Like, 10 years ago, you could sell a little bit of this kind of stuff, but nowhere near what it is now. And people, man, their palates are just so different now.”

Things have been progressing well for Fletcher, both in terms of a planned expansion and consumer response. In January 2012, the beer-reviewing website RateBeer.com (which, in full disclosure, I work for) named Anchorage Brewing Co. the top new brewer in the world for 2011, as ranked by the site’s users.

Better Bitters

It’s important to emphasize that brewers have effectively been filling niches for centuries, and, from our vantage point in the U.S., perhaps the vast majority of foreign breweries might feel like niche breweries if they were suddenly relocated to American soil. (The inverse might be rather less true, as this country’s craft beer scene has, for a multitude of reasons, generally tended to dabble in and sample from the older, established beer cultures abroad.) But it’s less a question of clear-cut categorization than it is something far more pragmatic: In competitive and well-developed craft beer scenes, how does a talented brewer manage to open up a new brewery without getting lost in the crowd?

Having recently researched and published a beer guide to Northern California, I can at least confidently speak to how things are taking shape in this section of the country. This region is home to breweries like Anchor Brewing, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Russian River Brewing Co., Bear Republic Brewing Co., Lost Coast Brewery, North Coast Brewing Co., Lagunitas Brewing Co., Marin Brewing Co., Moylan’s Brewery and so forth. One doesn’t simply walk into NorCal with a mediocre IPA. So many of the new breweries and breweries-in-planning here are doing one of three things: (1) opening up small-scale brewpubs or tasting rooms in cities that don’t yet have a local, (2) going the low-overhead contract or alternating proprietorship route (see sidebar), and/or (3) launching with a focused, underrepresented niche lineup.

One of these new local niche breweries is Dying Vines in Oakland, which opened in November 2010 and produces its English-minded lineup of session beers out of Linden Street Brewery, with which it maintains a close relationship. Kel Alcala, managing partner at Dying Vines Brewing, was also recently named head brewer at Linden Street, such that Alcala now oversees both breweries’ production.

“Whereas people refer to us as gypsy brewers and have that kind of moniker,” Alcala says, “for us it has always been that single drive to keep everything as tightly in-house as possible, and working with Linden Street [and founder Adam Lamoreaux] in particular, knowing that we’re going to make each batch as consistent as possible.” (Linden Street, in a similar vein, focuses entirely on brewing “Old California Lagers,” as they’ve termed them: effectively, pre-Prohibition steam beer.) In many ways, these brewing approaches can be seen as a throwback to equipment-driven realities. “Traditionally, English breweries are single-infusion, you know,” Alcala says. “You mix your grain and your water, you let it sit, you run it off, you collect it.” Similarly, a German brewery was traditionally set up to handle the step and decoction mashes specific to brewing those styles. Belgium: similar deal.

“There’s a lot of breweries over in Belgium that are cast-iron mash tuns, I mean old-school equipment that definitely imparts a different type of flavor, much more rustic-type flavor, and to have a linear production facility [like some of the U.S.-based brewers that occasionally dabble in Belgian styles] that’s all geared toward just whipping beer, and then try and do an artisanal style, … it kind of does a disservice.” While these limitations aren’t often appreciated or always noticed on the consumer level, a brewer’s system and equipment often strongly influence the beer styles that brewer can do well.

Skeptical? The devil’s habitually in the details, but consider the following: For the last two years, the Great American Beer Festival Small Brewing Company of the Year Award has gone to exactly these types of breweries: Chuckanut Brewery in 2011 (which opened in 2008 brewing German styles) and Funkwerks in 2012 (which opened in late 2010, with a focus on Belgian saisons). At Dying Vines, Alcala is brewing up beers like Old Brick Bitter and Dee’z English Mild that are atypically precise for American attempts at English-style ales. “When I have a person who grew up in England … come over here and tell me that this is the first proper pint of bitter they’ve had since they left home,” Alcala reflects, “it’s a good feeling.”

House of Barrels

Another Bay Area brewery (one that hasn’t even officially opened yet, as of this writing) will also rely on the excess brewing capacity of its neighbors. But it won’t be an alternating proprietorship. Nor can it really be considered a contract brewery. The Rare Barrel, opening up on the western side of Berkeley later this year, will be something else entirely.

Jay Goodwin, The Rare Barrel’s director of blending and brewing, previously served as head of barrel aging at The Bruery before venturing out on his own. With partners Alex Wallash and Brad Goodwin, he’ll be spearheading this ambitious approach to a barrel-aging-focused “beer company,” which will be more along the lines of Belgian lambic blenders than anything resembling a conventional American brewhouse. Two hundred and five red wine barrels from Central California already fill their warehouse, and they’re currently working out the final details with the local breweries they’ll be partnering with to provide them with unfermented wort.

The general concept: Create wort at local breweries with room to spare, truck it back to their warehouse in stainless-steel tanks (via a 16-foot box truck, as often used in wineries), and then handle the fermentation, conditioning, sampling, blending and packaging of a wide range of sour beers onsite. They hope to release their first beers by late 2013, predominantly packaged in 750 ml bottles and initially self-distributed throughout the Bay Area.

Their approach not only affords them the ability to avoid various upfront equipment costs (pattern alert!), but it also gives them the freedom to focus on a less-charted element of brewing that most other breweries tend to do as a side project. “If we focus all of our efforts on sour beer,” Wallash says, “we feel like we will have a better understanding of how to make it and overall, in the long run, make a better product than if we were to spread our production efforts out across a number of different things.”

The aphorism “constraints breed creativity” was something Goodwin mentions as a sort of premise underlying all of this, and that tends to ring true not only within the context of The Rare Barrel, but also for many of these other niche breweries as well. The saying “Jack of all trades, master of none” didn’t happen to come up—but it certainly could have.

Conceptual Art

One further way in which these new, niche-minded craft breweries are coming into focus is showcased by San Francisco’s Almanac Beer Co., which adds a more concept-minded approach to the above group. Jesse Friedman and Damian Fagan launched Almanac in 2010, with their “farm-to-bottle beer” embodying the motto “Beer is Agriculture.” In many ways, Almanac is taking the locally minded ideals of craft beer closer to their logical conclusion.

“The real core idea,” Friedman explains, “is that beer is traditionally made with dried ingredients that can easily be transported and stored. And the result is that it really divorces beer from a sense of place and a sense of, to pull from wine vocabulary, a sense of terroir. By collaborating with local farms, local agriculture systems, we really try and create beers with a culinary point of view, … a real sense of place and the idea that these beers are tied to the Northern California agricultures, and if you made these beers somewhere else with different ingredients, they would not be the same.”

Producing its beers at Hermitage Brewing Co. in San Jose (there’s a trend here, and especially so in the Bay Area), Almanac recently launched two year-round “California table beers”: a honey saison brewed with local honey from Marshall Farms and an extra pale ale incorporating mandarin oranges from Blossom Bluff Orchards in the San Joaquin Valley. They also showcase California-grown barley and hops throughout.

It’s an approach that’s been particularly well-matched to the culinary mindset around the Bay Area, allowing Almanac to place its bottled products in higher-end restaurants that often use the same purveyors that supply these beers’ special ingredients. While occasionally exemplified in similar approaches, like Fullsteam’s “plow-to-pint” mindset in North Carolina, it’s an uncommon brewing philosophy that pairs nicely with craft beer’s recently culinary push.

Friedman put the idea of niche brewing into an effective parallel with concepts well beyond craft beer. “Nintendo’s CEO, when they created the Wii,” he recalls, “talked about what they called their ‘blue ocean’ strategy. What that referred to is that there are two types of ocean: There’s red ocean and blue ocean. Red ocean is red because it’s [filled] with sharks fighting over the same area. And blue ocean is blue because there’s no one there.”

It will be interesting to see how many more new breweries favor this safer approach, particularly as the craft beer industry continues to grow more congested. I’ll be lounging out in the blue waters, should anyone need anything. Because to understand these niche brewers, and the ones that will soon follow, is to know why our beer options have never been better.

He didn’t offer a long list of adjectives about their flavor, simply stating they were “the finest and most aromatic hops grown.” Spalt Spalter, as they are known today, likely hadn’t changed much since 1511, when the town banned the export of highly sought-after hop cuttings, nor have they since. One difference that Hans Zeiner, manager of the Spalt hop growers association and a farmer himself, has noticed is requests from brewers for hops picked later, so they are richer in essential oils.

“The brewers want different hops. Some want a greener hop; some want a hop that is a bit more mature. It is about the aroma, the aroma they want.” He cautioned against waiting too long. “If it’s too old, the aroma is not so fine anymore. The aroma has changed, but I cannot say how it changed.” In Spalt “fine” seems to be the only adjective necessary.

Contrast that with a different sort of description from John Mallett, production manager at Bell’s Brewery in Michigan. Mallett spoke at a seminar during the 2012 Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego, along with other members of the Hop Quality Group, recently formed because these brewers recognize the need for better communication with American hop growers. Mallett quite obviously was referring to Bell’s own highly hopped Hopslam, a double IPA, when he explained the importance of telling farmers the sort of flavors and aromas brewers want.

“(Imagine) if you’d gone to the hop growers association 20 years ago and said, I’m going to have a beer that we make 4,000 barrels of one time a year,” he said. “It flies off the shelf at damn near $20 a six-pack, and you know what it smells like? It smells like your cat ate your weed and then pissed in the Christmas tree.”

John Mallett of Bell’s Brewery is a member of the Hop Quality Group, which recognizes the need for better communication with American hop growers.

The adjectives used to characterize hop flavor in beers today obviously include more than “fine.” For instance, there’s catty, polite language for cat piss; and dank, slang for potent marijuana. They reflect that more than a few consumers now embrace pungent, intense flavors considered offensive not long ago. But they also describe aromas such as pine, pineapple, grapefruit, tangerine, melon, mango, lychee, passion fruit, gooseberries, blueberries, stone fruits . . . even Lifesavers and sauvignon blanc.

The Barth-Haas Group, the world’s largest supplier of hop products, recently suggested that hops producing such unique flavors be called, logically enough, “flavor” (or “flavour”) hops. This is a bit confusing for Americans familiar with the brewing process. They understand that brewers boil hops, usually those with a higher percentage of alpha acids, for an extended period to extract bittering iso-alpha acids, and those hops are classified “bittering” or “alpha” hops. Because essential oils are lost during boiling, to preserve them brewers wait until later in the process to introduce “aroma” hops. Sometime between adding the hops for bitterness and those for aroma, they may include a “flavor” addition. This might result in floral and spicy notes found for hundreds of years, or the bolder new flavors of today.

To avoid any confusion, the Society of Hop Research in Germany more recently adopted the label of “Special Flavor Hops”  for varietals bred to exhibit attributes previously considered “un-hoppy.” Peter Darby, who oversees hop breeding in Great Britain, refers to them as “impact hops,” while others simply refer to them as “special.” That many drinkers want these new flavors is clear. Why some hops deliver them and others do not is not.

What Makes American Hops Different

Hops add many positive attributes to beer, most notably aroma and flavor, the latter a result of what’s experienced in the mouth, including bitterness. The chemistry involved in bitterness is relatively well understood. Not so with aroma. More than 20 years ago, two researchers in Oregon proposed establishing an Aroma Unit (AU) comparable to the International Bitterness Unit (IBU). They intended that brewers would use their Hop Aroma Component Profiles, which identified 22 specific compounds, along with the AU, much as they would use the alpha acid content of a particular variety to adjust hopping rates. Since the 1960s “scientists have tried to identify the compound responsible for hoppy character in beer without success. Hoppy aroma in beer is probably not attributable to a single component but rather to the synergistic effect of several compounds,” they wrote in 1992.

Hop scientists have learned much since then, but that statement remains frustratingly valid. J.L. Hanin first used steam distillation to isolate hop oils in 1819, and later in the century Alfred Chapman isolated the key compounds myrcene, humulene, linalool, lynalyl-isonate, geraniol and diterpene. After the introduction of gas chromatography in the 1950s, researchers soon identified more than 400 compounds. The contribution many of them make is not clear because they occur at low levels, individually below perception thresholds. Synergy may change that.

Twenty-first century discoveries have brought some elements into focus. In 2003 Toru Kishimoto at the Asahi Breweries  research laboratory in Japan, determined a compound called 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one (otherwise referred to as 4MMP) is a main contributor to muscat grape/black currant character apparently unique to hops of American heritage. It has a low odor threshold and occurs naturally in grapes, wine, green tea and grapefruit juice. Hops grown in the New World, including New Zealand and Australia as well as the United States, contain 4MMP and other compounds observed only at trace levels in hops grown in England and on the European continent.

Other researchers in Japan found several American varieties contained compounds that were transformed into limelike and other citrus flavors during fermentation, but that existed only at very low levels in European aroma hops.

Something obviously happened to European and American hop varieties during the course of at least 1 million years since they split from one another. The genus Humulus likely originated in Mongolia at least 6 million years ago. A European type diverged from that Asian group more than 1 million years ago; a North American group migrated from the Asian continent about 500,000 years later. Although three North American botanical varieties exist in the wild, scientists don’t agree on how much they differ from one another, but they clearly are genetically unlike the Europeans. Virtually all hops cultivated today either are direct descendants of European types selected for their brewing and agronomic qualities, also known as landrace hops, are European varieties crossbred to improve those brewing and agronomic qualities, or are a cross between European and American varieties.

That last category didn’t exist until 1917, when E.S. Salmon of Wye College in England took a hop collected in the Manitoban wild, and thus obviously native American, and pollinated it with English hops. Today, every hop in demand for exotic, fruity flavors is such a cross.

Consider Citra, the poster child for special flavors. Descriptors of its aroma include grapefruit, lime, citrus, gooseberry, tropical fruits, lychee, melon and sauvignon blanc winelike. It is half Hallertau Mittelfrüh, a German landrace variety often referred to as “noble”; one-quarter U.S. Tettnanger, which is in fact the English landrace variety Fuggle; 19 percent Brewer’s Gold, one of the first hops to result from the crosses Salmon made in 1917; 3 percent East Kent Goldings, another English landrace variety; and 3 percent unknown, which might well be—like Brewer’s Gold—influenced by American wild hops.

(View a graphic on the future of Citra)

Hop Oils and the Magic of Biotransformation

When brewers talk about hops, they actually mean the cones of a female hop plant. Hop oils constitute up to 4 percent of those cones, but more often much less. The four most prominent are myrcene, caryophyllene, humulene and farnesene. The first is a monoterpene, meaning it consists of 10 carbon units, while the latter are sesquiterpenes (15 carbon units). Myrcene has a green, herbaceous, resinous aroma associated with fresh hops and not always considered desirable.

It often constitutes 50 percent or more of the oils in American cultivars. Most of its aroma will disappear during boiling, but it can be prominent in dry-hopped beers because it has a low perception threshold on average. People’s perceptions of aromas, in fact, vary widely, presenting another challenge for all seeking to understand hop aroma. The prominent oils in hops are found in many other plants, and in the case of myrcene these include thyme, lemongrass, verbena, pistachio and fruits such as mango and grapefruit.

In their oxygenated form, sesquiterpenes are more likely to survive boiling, resulting in herbal and spicy aromas also described as “fine” or “noble.” Farnesene, for instance, makes a distinct floral contribution to beers hopped with Saaz. It often constitutes less than 1 percent of oils in bred hops but up to 20 percent in Saaz. One specific caryophyllene alcohol compound, an oxidation product, may add a very strong cedar wood note many describe, again, as “noble.” However, as much as half of the drinking population may be blind to this particular compound. Floral, mildly woody, spicy are qualities that not long ago almost exclusively defined pleasant hop aroma. They remain desirable today, but may be overwhelmed by the addition of hops—particularly bold hops—late in the boil or post-fermentation.

As a hop ripens, many other monoterpenes form along with myrcene, including linalool, geraniol, nerol, citronellol and limonene. Although their presence is often measured in tenths of a percent, they are essential to producing citrus, fruity, floral and woody aromas, whether through synergy or interaction with yeast.

Research in Japan points to the importance of the physical interaction and biotransformations that take place in the presence of yeast. In one study, scientists investigated how geraniol and citronellol, accompanied by an excess of linalool, contribute to citrus aromas and flavors. Focusing on the Citra hop, they sought to identify the key flavor compounds contributing to the aromas specific to the variety—including passion fruit, gooseberries and lychee.

They brewed one beer with only Citra hops and another with Hallertau Tradition and coriander seeds. Both Citra and coriander are rich in geraniol and linalool. The finished Citra beer contained not only those two oils but also citronellol, which had been converted from geraniol during fermentation. The same transformation from geraniol into citronellol occurred during fermentation of the beer made with coriander. Taste panels perceived the beers as relatively similar.

The same researchers followed with another study that compared the composition of monoterpene alcohols in various hops and examined the behavior of geraniol and citronellol under different hopping regimens. They concluded that blending geraniol-rich hops increased the amount of geraniol and citronellol in beer, and that this enhanced citrus character. They determined that hops more easy to find in the market, in this case Apollo and Bravo, could produce aromas similar to hops in short supply.

Still another study in Japan pointed to just how complex sorting out the variables can be. In that one, scientists examined the changes in hop-related compounds during the fermentation process, finding that keeping everything else the same and changing only the yeast strain resulted in noticeably different hop aromas.

Such results illustrate the need for still more research.

Oregon hop merchant Indie Hops, founded only in 2009, pledged more than $1 million for what can broadly be described as aroma research at Oregon State University. “Our ultimate goal is to determine what is it in hop oil that drives flavor,” said Thomas Shellhammer, who is in charge of the brewing science education and research programs at OSU. Shaun Townsend, an OSU faculty member who heads the breeding aspect of the partnership with the Indie Hops, would then use the information to develop cultivars with particular oil profiles.

Meanwhile, There’s Alchemy

Greater understanding of the hop aroma and flavor matrix doesn’t automatically make it easier to integrate bolder hop aromas and flavors into the larger beer flavor matrix. Patrick Ting, for 30 years a hop chemist at Miller (and MillerCoors) before recently retiring, pointed out it is a mistake for brewers to try to equate specific oils with specific odor compounds. “You can’t say we’ll add a little bit of this, a little bit of that,” he said.

Although hop aroma remains something of a black box, brewers find ways on what seems a daily basis to maximize these new flavors. Given a chance to brew with two of the new German “Special Flavor Hops” early in 2012, Bear Republic Brewing brewmaster Richard Norgrove started with a base best described as a wheat wine. He blended Mandarina Bavaria and Polaris in a ratio of 60 to 40 or 40 to 60, depending on the addition, making one at the beginning of a 90-minute boil, one with 60 minutes remaining, one with 40, and then dry hopping with the pair.

“I like to do a lot of blending, maybe change the way the oils come across,” he said. He talked in terms of abstract art versus portrait art, probably because he paints with watercolors himself. “With watercolors you dilute or strengthen the vibrancy of color by the way you use water.”

Dry hopping may eliminate one bit of the mystery for brewers, because post-fermentation hopping preserves much of the aroma in a freshly kilned hop. However, the translation is not direct, and Sierra Nevada brewmaster Steve Dresler said that can be good for his beer. The brewery has learned if yeast is not still active at the beginning of dry hopping, some odor compounds will not develop. “We don’t get the same floral estery notes in some other beers if we use the torpedo [dry hopping] process simply cold without yeast contact time,” he said.

Sierra Nevada literally invented its “torpedo,” a device packed with hops through which its brewers circulate beer after fermentation, to dry hop more efficiently. It uses Magnum (a high alpha hop rich in oil), Crystal and a restrained amount of Citra to dry hop Torpedo Extra IPA. “You can overbrew with Citra,” Dresler explained.

Once again, Citra is a poster child for the new. It can be divisive, and that’s likely part of its appeal. When Sierra Nevada began evaluating Citra about five years ago, men on the brewery’s tasting panel described tropical fruit flavors, while women called the same beer catty or said it reminded them of tomato plants. Women on average detect odors at much lower concentrations and are more likely to rate smells as more intense and unpleasant, but many men share an unfavorable perception of Citra.

Gene Probasco, who started the first American private breeding program at John I. Haas, oversaw the creation of Citra. “[The cross] was made for aroma,” he said, and at the time “mild” was a synonym for “good” when it came to aroma. That was 1990.

It was part of a project for a large brewery client, and nothing came of it. Two other large brewing companies essentially owned the rights, one after the other, to the hop during the next dozen years, but ultimately neither of them had a use for it. Only after the Hop Breeding Co. began sending samples to craft breweries was it recognized as special. That was 2008. Understanding why other equally special hops have the impact they do may take a little more time.

In John Palmer’s How To Brew, he recommends pitching around 400 billion yeast cells for a 5-gallon batch of high-gravity beer. (He does not, thankfully, recommend counting them out one by one.) On a per-bottle basis, that means more than 7 billion yeast helped make that 12-ounce bottle of imperial stout—equivalent to the world’s human population.

VIVA LA RESISTANCE?

Unlike their wild counterparts, many cultured strains evolved to have redundant sets of chromosomes. While more resistant to genetic mutation, the tradeoff is that they now reproduce asexually instead of the more fun way.

LONGEVITY

In 1995, Dr. Raul Cano of California Polytechnic State University reportedly extracted and revived dormant yeast cells from a 45-million-year-old piece of Burmese amber, knocking the laboratory-grade socks off the scientific community. Today, this ancient yeast is used to create beers in the Fossil Fuels Brewing Company lineup, currently brewed by Kelley Bros. Brewing in Manteca, CA.

TEAM BUILDING

Though typically only a few micrometers across, yeast in actively fermenting beers can generate a thick foam upwards of a foot high. While this might not seem particularly Herculean, it’s the scale equivalent of seeing an anthill a hundred stories tall.

SELF-SACRIFICE

There comes a certain point when one needs to throw in the microscopic towel. After a yeast cell dies, it will often go through a process called autolysis during which it releases enzymes that break down its cellular structures: dispersing nutrients and minerals and, in turn, helping to feed its neighbors.

Granted, it’s hard to be sexy when you’re only a few micrometers across.

But while there have been countless developments improving the science and art of brewing over the past few hundred years—a significantly expanded variety of hops, vast improvements to malt kilning, the invention of numerous technological doohickeys to improve quality control, etc.—the identification, isolation, and selective breeding of yeast has likely been the most formative.

In the last year or so, a select crew of beer fans and brewers has begun proselytizing about what they regard as British beer’s cutting edge—craft keg. But the word keg sends shivers down the backs of members of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) who believe in traditional beer or cask-conditioned beer, which they call real ale.

Draft beer traditionally had been put into a cask with enough yeast to create a secondary fermentation and is dispensed with a hand pump. It is unpasteurized and unfiltered.

But by the early 1970s, much of the beer served in Britain was from kegs. The beer was filtered and pasteurized and carbon dioxide was used to dispense it. The advantage over the casks was that there was no sediment in the beer, but the disadvantage was that there was more gas in keg beer, which some believe diluted the natural flavour.

This is when CAMRA was created and helped partially reverse the momentum of kegs and preserve natural beers in Britain.

Nowadays, exponents of craft keg, using updated technologies, urge drinkers to forget the past and judge their new beers on taste and not on how they are dispensed. And it may be working.

Spotting a Trend

Craft beer is enjoying a healthy state of affairs in the United Kingdom. There are nearly 800 breweries, mainly micro in size, and many are showing growth. There is a multitude of beer styles available and New World hops have never been more popular.

Social media has also helped as brewers, beer journalists and beer geeks have taken to the blogosphere to discuss beer.

And 2011 saw more craft beer bars open. Then there is the influence of the North American beer scene.

Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale and Brooklyn Lager are commonly seen in bars on draft (in other words keg!), while brewers such as Odell Brewing Co., Flying Dog and Brooklyn Brewery visit from across the Atlantic and organize tastings.

And the emergence of United Kingdom craft lager brewers—see AAB, Vol 31, Number 4—has persuaded brewers that beer can be dispensed in other ways than by hand pump and still taste good.

“I find all sorts of people trying craft keg,” said Glyn Roberts, former manager of The Rake, arguably London’s first craft beer bar when it opened in 2005, “Not just young people, but older drinkers too. I have a feeling that it will keep its momentum partly because many people like drinking cold fizzy beer and partly because more craft breweries are using keg as a form of dispense.

“I believe that there are a couple of reasons for the latter. Firstly the beer keeps longer and is more robust… Secondly I think that there’s an element of emulating the U.S. where there is very little cask dispense.”

In Greenwich, Meantime Brewery’s founder and brewmaster Alastair Hook could be forgiven a slight self-congratulatory smile at craft keg’s emergence. When he began Meantime in 1999, every new brewery majored in cask beer. But Munich-trained Hook specialized in European beer styles such as helles, pilsner and Vienna.

British styles such as IPA, porter, stout and pale ale were eventually brewed, all of which are dispensed from kegs or bottle. “It’s been a tough battle,” he said, “but there have been a lot of changes in the last five years and I take a lot of pride in thinking that we have helped in many ways to inspire other brewers.”

But Hook is quick to state that Meantime is not opposed to real ale. One of the company’s best customers is the Market Porter, a South London pub noted for serving up to a dozen real ales. For Hook good beer is a simple matter of technology plus the absence of air from the beer container. “Air is bad for beer and the only people who don’t understand that are those who believe that cask is the only way,” he said.

“If cask conditioning is done properly, you have a re-conditioning in the cask, which should work really well. But if the cask is left hanging about for too long, it is not good for it. We have cask beers in our bars. We should only be talking about good beer.”

Making the Switch

One brewer inspired by Hook is Jeff Rosenmeier. He moved to Britain from the United States in the 1990s to work in software engineering but was also an avid homebrewer. He swapped bytes for beer in 2005 when he started Lovibonds in Henley (formerly home to Brakspear’s). Even though cask beer was initially brewed, he soon switched to bottles and kegs.

“All the local micros did cask beer so I thought I would have to do it as well,” he said. “I was a true nano brewery at the time, doing 100-liter batches and I bought a dozen firkins. I started selling these to my local free house and discovered that at day four in the pub the beer that I worked so hard to produce tasted flat, lifeless and was starting to sour.

Lovibonds Brewery's Jeff Rosenmeier, founder and brewmaster, has been brewing on the historic Henley-on-the-Thames since 2005.

He said he was aware of what Hook was doing and it made sense to him and gave him confidence to try something different.

Tasting through his portfolio of beers, you get a sense of his eclectic approach.

Henley Gold is a wheat beer that seemingly owes more to Flanders than Bavaria. There are bananas and cloves on the nose, along with a brittle herby/spicy background. The mouth-feel is creamy and caressing and the palate is suggestive of ripe bananas, accompanied by a medicinal aniseed-like note; the finish is dry and slightly woody.

Henley Dark has a lustrous, silky texture, reminiscent of chocolate ice cream, along with some smokiness, delicate roast notes and mocha coffee. At the back of the throat there is a hint of orange. Served cold and crisp from the keg, it has a refreshingly frisky nature. It’s a party beer, a cheerful, bright-eyed beer and I couldn’t help reflect that dark beers in the cask often seem more somber. These were good beers and if I hadn’t been told, I wouldn’t have known they were dispensed from kegs.

“It is funny to watch all of the brainpower and bytes wasted on the debate about what is ‘real’ or not,” said Rosenmeier, “and I’m as guilty as anyone. But, the fact of the matter is that 99 percent of the British beer-drinking public don’t care whether a beer is dispensed with extraneous CO2 or whether or not a cask breather (where a layer of CO2 keeps oxygen from contact with the beer) has been employed. All they care about is if the beer tastes good and they feel they are getting value for their money.

“We don’t do any filtration or pasteurisation or any other voodoo; therefore the beer that we package always contains yeast. To me it is still a live product. Where we fall down with CAMRA is with dispense, as all of our beers are pushed to the bar with CO2. The only by-product of us using CO2 is that our beer can last months in a cold cellar. Our bottled beers are also not filtered, however we keep the yeast counts low so that we don’t get the chunky style beer like most real ales.”

Every Dog has its Day

One brewery that has certainly set up craft keg as a superior alternative to real ale is Scotland’s iconoclastic BrewDog. These self-proclaimed punks have been masters of public relations with stunts such as brewing the strongest beer in the world, encouraging fans to invest in the business and engaging in online spats with CAMRA.

However, they also have managed to produce a stunning set of beers (plus some duds as well). They initially produced their beers in bottles and casks but with the opening of their branded bars in Aberdeen and Edinburgh (with London and other cities imminent), they have become vocal champions of the craft keg.

“We always believed kegs were the future,” said James Watt, BrewDog’s co-founder. “Cask is traditional to the U.K. and does well at showcasing some pretty boring beers in a way to make them seem a little bit more interesting. However the U.K. cask scene is also traditional, stuffy and old-fashioned with CAMRA’s overbearing influence making the whole thing very strange.

“We wanted to get away from all that and get new drinkers into the craft beer category and we see kegs as the way to do this. If we look at the U.S. craft beer scene, it is kegs that are leading the way. The same thing will happen in the U.K.”

But it’s also instructive to talk to more conventional, brewers. They often see craft keg as another product in their beer arsenal. They make real ale and sell a lot of it, but craft keg’s longer shelf life gives them a chance to get into outlets where real ale might not appear.

“Keg beer opens up a whole new trade customer base,” said Bob Hogg, Commercial Manager of Scottish brewery Inveralmond. “This is particularly true in a relatively small market like Scotland. Keg beer also gives us an opportunity to reach consumers who may not necessarily choose real ale first. As for the name craft keg, I don’t really mind what it is called as long as it is good beer—good beer can be served in keg format as well as cask. We are finding pub owners quite prepared to try something new as they realize that having a point of difference can help drive footfall to their pub, whether it be cask, craft keg or a combination of both.”

Inveralmond initially began with a Czech-style svetly lezak called Sunburst, which originally had been served as a “cask-conditioned” lager. Then it was kegged and served colder with more CO2. Following this, the brewery then felt it could do the same with Lia Fail, a dark chestnut ale with mocha coffee, chocolate, vanilla and espresso notes on the palate. The beer is chill conditioned for two weeks at minus 1 degree C prior to filtration with the addition of some CO2.

There are some problems with keg beer and one is getting it to the market. More investment is needed for keg beer than for casks, for example some pubs require font and chilling equipment for the kegs.

New Craft Keg Brewery

Close to the Rake in London is an exciting new wave brewery whose approach typifies the eclectic nature of the craft keg. The Kernel Brewery is beneath a railway arch in the Bermondsey district of south London, an area that was flattened during the 1940/41 London Blitz.

Head brewer at The Kernel Brewery, Evin O'Riordain, holding court in the brewhouse.

Started by Evin O’Riordain in 2009, its beers are mainly bottled with the rest in casks and kegs for brewery open house on Saturdays.

According to O’Riordain, “We have been approached by lots of pubs for kegs, so it would seem that the demand is there. Our beer suits bottles and it may suit kegs as well, but for us keg conditioning is more difficult than bottle conditioning. It requires more equipment, and the kegs require more looking after and are harder for pubs to serve well. We reckon that certain beers, for example our IPAs, work brilliantly in keg, and not so well in cask.”

At the brewery, I try a glass of the 7.8 percent Export Stout, dispensed from a keg. It is full of espresso, roast coffee beans, milk chocolate on the nose; the mouth-feel has a rich chocolaty texture with a firm bitterness and a dry cracker-like finish that has delicate fruity notes in the background. It is magnificent.

Kernel is new but other more established breweries, known for their cask beer, are looking to include craft kegs in their portfolio. These include Titanic (whose keg stout replaced a well-known Irish brand at the bar counter in one pub I visited); Fuller’s (its keg London Porter is gorgeous); Butcombe; and cutting-edge Welsh brewery Otley.

“We are trialing three of our beers in keg,” said brewery founder Nick Otley, “The Oxymoron Black IPA, 07 Weissen and Motley Brew IPA. We’re confident that the finished keg product will also be a good match with certain food, but we are only doing it on a small scale at the moment and will not be investing too much in it. Keg will never replace cask. Cask is unique to the U.K. and should remain so. I certainly don’t want my only choice in a pub to be cold and fizzy, but there is definitely room for it as an alternative.”

As brewery lore has it, Otley Brewing Company's Nick Otley was once a fortune cookie writer.

Otley’s words are also echoed by the Stuart Howe, head brewer at Sharp’s, recently purchased by Molson-Coors.

“It is not an area I think I will be entering in the near future,” he tells me, “From a brewer’s perspective, keg is good because you can use higher levels of CO2 to provide balance for fuller beers with bigger alcoholic strengths. On the downside, unless you are filling kegs with unprocessed beers, centrifugation, filtration and/or pasteurization of beer for kegging does change beer flavour from that you can experience in the brewery. Cask ale is as close as you can get to drinking it from a tank in the brewery.”

If there was one thing that demonstrated craft keg’s arrival it was the debut appearance of the Craft Beer in Keg awards category at the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) National Beer Competition in 2011. This was groundbreaking given that the vast majority of SIBA members produce cask beer.

I judged this category and found it thoroughly intriguing. It was divided into lager styles, wheat beers, stouts and porters and a variety of ales. There were good beers, plus a few indifferent chaps.

Thornbridge’s Kipling, a self-proclaimed South Pacific Pale Ale, had a big biff of passion fruit on the nose, but little else. I love it when served on cask. While Hambleton’s Nightmare, a gorgeous stout that has won plenty of awards in cask, was all butter toffee and mocha on the nose and thin roast water on the palate.

On the other hand, Thornbridge’s Jaipur IPA on keg was a glorious explosion of tropical fruit and grapefruit on the nose, a rollercoaster of sensation that continued its ride on the palate.

Is the rise of craft kegs really a revolution? I am not sure, but it does mean that the British beer drinker is getting more choice.

The likes of BrewDog like to paint it as a battle between keg and cask, a chance to punk it up in front of their brewing elders. However, I would suspect that for most craft keg brewers, it’s about improving beer choice.

And perhaps brewers don’t need CAMRA’s guiding hand as they used to, while the organisation’s Chief Executive Mike Benner takes a phlegmatic view, while firmly stating a policy of no change: ‘CAMRA is committed to choice. We want pub-goers to have access to a range of quality and interesting real ales. Our role is to promote real ale as our national drink, but that doesn’t prevent brewers producing other beer products for their customers.’

Whatever the motivations and the reactions, craft keg has shaken up the British brewing industry and it will be interesting to see how far it goes.

Brewdog Punk IPA (5.6%)—a turbo blast of resins and grapefruit on the nose; prickly but pleasing carbonation and muscular grapefruit followed by a long dry finish.

Camden Pale Ale (5%)—sprightly and sparkling in the glass with a quenching bitter lemon note and an enticing bittersweet finish; a real handful of zesty notes.

Titanic Stout (4.5%)—a cool draft of dark malt aromas (toffee, a hint of tobacco box), while the palate delivers more toffee, creamy mocha and a flurry of roast grain notes at the end.

Meantime IPA (7.5%)—perfumed citrusy nose with the spritzy palate featuring a harmonious balance of Seville orange and spicy peppery hop underpinned by a stern, biscuity base.

Carbonation can be traced back through the centuries. There is evidence that the ancient Sumerians had foam in their beer, which would indicate the existence of carbonation. It would be a few more centuries before airtight commercial bottles allowed drinkers to have stronger carbonation one pop at a time and then a few years more before advances in molecular sciences allowed brewers to force carbonation into the beer itself.

To just think of carbonation as merely bubbles in a glass is to dismiss the science, passion and countless hours brewers and researchers have put into making sure the effervescence is all it should be.

More Than Bubbles

Carbonation occurs after carbon dioxide (CO₂) is dissolved inside a liquid. In beer natural carbonation first occurs during the fermentation process when yeast absorbs the sugar in the wort creating both alcohol and carbon dioxide. Some brewers will also add additional sugars to unpasteurized bottles of beer, allowing yeast to feast a second time, thus allowing additional CO₂ into the beer.

In Washington’s Yakima Valley, Jason Perrault developed the new rock star, IPA-worthy hop that is Citra—high in all-important alpha acids and yields notes of pineapple and mango—at Yakima Chief Ranch, now part of the joint venture with John I. Haas, Inc. called the Hop Breeding Co. Dr. John Henning hopes his new Mt. Rainier hop—spicy with a hint of licorice—catches on; he created it at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service (USDA-ARS) on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, OR. It’s a workhorse Noble variety hop akin to grassy Hallertauer that is fairly disease resistant, tolerant to downy mildew and high-yielding with the added benefit of a desirable aroma—if you like a little licorice notes mixed with your citrus. And across the Atlantic, Dr. Peter Darby finally gained the EU Plant Variety Rights for his Sovereign hop, which exhibits classic English hop aroma like that of Fuggles—earthy with a kiss of tropical fruit—but as a dwarf variety so attractive to British hop growers. After years of breeding research and evaluation dating back to the 20th century, their efforts are just now blossoming in new beers. So imagine what you’ll be drinking starting in 2020 based on what they’re doing in their respective offices today.

Is it rocket science? Not exactly. NASA recently retired the space shuttle Discovery after 30 years of exploring Earth’s low orbit so as to focus on exploring deep space, beginning with the Mars Science Laboratory and plans for the Juno spacecraft already in the works. While hop-breeding programs are, by nature, futuristic, there is way less computer hardware involved and way more dirt. Sure, there’s some software involved, but hop crosses yield seedlings that are planted in test farms and evaluated based on agronomics and aromatics. There’s no HAL 9000 in this Beer Odyssey capable of olfaction. Instead, someone like Perrault, for example, simply stands in the field, grinds some leaves between his fingers, brings them to his nose and has no clue if he’s getting a whiff of the next Simcoe (the pine-and-grapefruit scented megastar for which he holds the patent). But there’s roughly one-hundredth of a percent chance that he smells the future. And it kinda smells like citrus, or tomatoes, or possibly cheesecake.

(UNMALTED)

Contribution: vibrant wheat flavor; improved head/foam retention
Styles: traditional in witbiers and lambics
Examples: 3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze, Cantillon Gueuze, Hitachino Nest White Ale, La Cumbre Cerro Blanco, Moonlight Sour Mash Wheat, Ommegang Witte

ROASTED BARLEY

(UNMALTED)

Contribution: bitter, roasted character; improved head/foam retention; darker color
Styles: traditional in dry stouts, and common in many darker styles
Examples: Avery Out of Bounds Stout, Guinness Draught, North Coast Old No. 38 Stout, Porterhouse Wrasslers XXXX Stout

OATS

(UNMALTED)

Contribution: silky mouthfeel; heightened creaminess and body
Styles: traditional in oatmeal stouts; also found in various stouts and porters
Examples: Cigar City Maduro Oatmeal Brown Ale, Moonlight Old Combine 4-Grain Lager, Rogue Shakespeare Stout, Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout, Southern Tier Oat

SUGAR

Forms: sucrose (table sugar), dextrose (corn sugar), brown sugar, invert sugar, molasses, maple syrup, caramel, Belgian candi sugar and syrup, treacle, jaggery, piloncillo, etc.
Contribution: lighter or darker color; can boost alcohol, increase dryness (readily fermented by yeast), and impart a wide range of flavors and aromas depending upon the type
Styles: traditional in many stronger Belgian ales (everything from white sugar to dark syrups); often found in milds, bitters, cream ales, etc., as well as a wide range of higher-alcohol beers
Examples: Bear Republic Big Bear Black Stout, Bear Republic Racer 5, The Bruery Autumn Maple, Kuhnhenn Extraneous Ale, Russian River Pliny the Elder, Russian River Damnation, Three Floyds Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout, Westmalle Dubbel, Westmalle Tripel

CORN

Contribution: lightens body and color (compared to malted barley); can add some sweetish corn flavor and aroma
Styles: traditional in many contemporary American lagers, pre-Prohibition pilsners, cream ales, Kentucky commons, and Flanders red ales; often found in bitters, Mexican-style lagers, etc.
Examples: Bear Republic El Oso Lager, Cigar City Batch #69 Double Cream Ale, Cigar City Guava Grove, Craftsman 1903 Lager, Ithaca Brute, Rodenbach Grand Cru, Thunderhead Cornstalker Dark Wheat

RICE

Contribution: similar to corn, but drier effect overall; very light flavor contributions
Styles: traditional in many American and Japanese light lagers
Examples: Bear Republic Racer X, The Bruery Humulus Rice, The Bruery Trade Winds Tripel, Great Divide Samurai, Hitachino Nest Red Rice Ale, Kuhnhenn Classic American Lager, Kuhnhenn DR (“Double Rice”) IPA

FRUIT

Contribution: can increase dryness (fruit sugars can be readily fermented by yeast) and impart a wide range of flavors, aromas, and colors
Styles: traditional in fruit lambics and a wide range of fruit beers
Examples: 3 Fonteinen Schaerbeekse Kriek, Cantillon Blåbær Lambik, New Glarus Raspberry Tart, New Glarus Wisconsin Belgian Red, Selins Grove The Phoenix Kriek, Shorts Peaches & Crème

OTHER ADJUNCTS

Include: rye (unmalted), honey, spelt, sorghum, millet, buckwheat, pumpkin, spruce tips, sweet potatoes, peas, beets, kambocha squash, kamut, rhubarb, and chocolate.