So the profile of the beer was dictated in part by the availability of ingredients.
Geoff: The availability and the environment. It’s classic: that’s what happened in Plzen; that’s what happened in Burton.
Some of the fun anecdotes were told to me by a person by the name of Bob DeArmond. He was in his nineties when I got here in 1980. In territorial days, alcohol sales were only allowed for medicinal, mechanical and scientific purposes. He said you could get a beer and a sandwich for 25 cents, but they couldn’t sell the beer. But if you didn’t eat the sandwich, you could give it them back to them for 20 cents.
Marcy: Lord help you if you ever ate that sandwich.
How did the history of the area figure in the formulation of Smoked Porter?
Geoff: Most of the breweries at the turn of the century were brewing and malting companies. I’m sure they were forced to be innovative. You’re at the end of the supply chain here in Alaska, you’ve got a booming work force—the miners are working six days a week, 10 hours a day. These same malt houses were invariably making some of the more powerful beers—porters and stouts. One particular brewery really talked about their porters.
In the early 1800s, on the East Coast porters were very popular. The blond beers from Europe started dominating the East Coast, but the West Coast was behind. So in 1900 there were lot of dark beers being made in Alaska.
Here we are: we’re in Alaska, there are dark beers, there are malting facilities, and the only hard wood around here is alder. This was a frontier town; everybody was using wood for cooking and for heat. If you walked down the streets of Juneau in 1907, what you smelled was smoke. In a town where smoke is everywhere, it’s probably in the beer. It wasn’t out of place.
So there’s no particular connection to Bamberg, which we associate with the remaining smoked beers. This is something you arrived at through a different route.
Geoff: Right. Across the street a friend of ours had a fish-smoking operation. We’d get together routinely on a Friday afternoon. He’d bring over some of the products he had, we’d have our beer, and we’d commiserate.
There was a point when we thought, boy, it would be great to make a beer touching on the history of Alaska and the fact that to get these dark roasted malts, the old maltsters were having to really crank up the heat, invariably resulting in some smoke. And here we are finding smoke is a perfectly legitimate flavor in both beer and this fish.
It was an interesting investigation: he knew smoke, and we knew beer and malt, so we collaborated in making part of our grain bill that would impart smoke character.
With smoke, there’s a real balance if it is to appeal. Cross that line, and it becomes objectionable. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. But in subtle uses, it adds a dimension that is very, very enjoyable.
Back 200-300 years ago, everything was filled with smoke. When smoke was referred to, it was almost always in a negative way because there was no such thing as a smokeless environment: if you had heat, you had smoke. So there was never any reference to smoke in a positive way. If there wasn’t any reference to smoke, it wasn’t because the smoke wasn’t there; it was just at a level that was acceptable.
Does the recipe change substantially from year to year or are the differences purely the influence of time?
Geoff: I would say 90-plus percent is purely the impact of time. Obviously, we are brewing the Smoked Porter just one time for that year, so there are probably some nuances that change, but we really strive to make the same beer every single time.
Of course you have hop crops that are a little different, malts that are a little different—the typical beer variants. And even though we have a computer-controlled smokehouse, you still have humidity differences in a year. But I would say that the changes you taste truly are time’s effect on the beer.
