5 Rabbit Cervecería was asked to participate in a 2016 Craft Beer Week collaboration with the Lakeview brewpub, DryHop Brewers. This would also include an art show, which I eventually understood to mean I had to come up with some actual art. While I’ve been doing beer labels and other commercial design work for decades, fine art is a little alien to me.
In 2016 I was honored to be invited to judge at the Slow Food Beer competition in Celaya, Mexico. Its state—Guanajuato—had been declared to be the least gastronomically developed in Mexico, but despite that, there are some thrilling bright spots. Celaya is the heart of Mexico’s dairy goat industry, famous for its cheese as well as cajeta, a creamy caramel made from goat’s milk. More on that later.
My friend Marcelo from Brazil was in town yesterday and brought me a couple of surprises: A small cask made from umburana wood, meant for aging cachaça, and a slab of a highly aromatic wood referred to in Brazil as “balsam” (Myroxolon balsamum). I couldn’t be more excited.
Sometimes you find the most wonderful treasures in the most unlikely places, but after some contemplation, they not only seem to make sense, but may even seem inevitable. I often search on eBay for art items with beery subject matter, like magazine illustrations or old genre prints of people drinking beer. Guess what I found this time.
This is a beer history timeline I put together for my book Mastering Homebrew. Divisions within the line show when hopped beer, lager and modern craft beers made their mark.
I am standing on the base of an upturned tree, on a ridge overlooking the jagged tips of the Cascade Range of northern Washington. It is dark, save for the blue illumination of a new moon. Around me, the ancient sun-baked roots of a toppled spruce tree fan out mechanically in all directions forming a throne Ralph calls the “Starship Enterprise.” For HopUnion’s gregarious leader Ralph Olson, this is a retreat from the high-pressure world of hops down in Yakima, just an hour to the east. The fact that he has bestowed this imaginative fantasy on a dead tree speaks worlds about those who spend time in the hop trade.
I am met in the Czech Republic by Richard Mattas, Managing Director of Czech Hops Worldwide, the HopUnion affiliate there. As he whisks me off toward the hop region, we first stop at Plzen, about an hour south of Prague. At the Pilsener Urquel brewery we quickly ditch the tour and duck into the brewhouse. There’s a cart near the kettles holding a can of tarry hop extract and a bag of sharp-smelling pellets next to the more traditional Saaz aroma hops.
Change is occurring in all of the world’s hop regions, but is most dramatic in the largest of those, the Hallertau of Bavaria. Hops are still grown in “gardens” here, with an average size of about 15 acres, despite the fact that there are over 43,000 acres in cultivation. Today there remain just one-eighth the number of farms as in 1900, despite the ten-fold size of the harvest. This consolidation, which will continue into the future, is having a dramatic impact.
The region of Kent is just to the south and east of London, a rolling green land dotted by ancient villages and castles. Situated between London and the coast closest to France, it has always been washed by foreign influences: Celts and Romans, then the Normans in 1066, and waves of Flemish immigrants in the late 15th century who brought their beloved hops with them, changing the region—and British beer—forever.