SMaSH is a catchy – really rather smashing – acronym for a simple brewers’ learning exercise. There’s no doubt both pro and home brewers get a lot out of tasting the experiment of beers constructed from limited ingredients. But why is SMaSH – Single Malt and Single Hop –  showing up as a description in commercial releases? Is it a buzz word, a brewer’s experimentation artifact or something the beer drinking public appreciates?

Not a lot of ingredients showing up on this brewing sheet from Black Sands Brewing Co.

Recently, just after noticing that SMaSH beers were a topic on The Sessions, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, and learning that Oregon even has a SMaSH festival, I ran into Cole Emde at the monthly Meet The Brewers Event put on by the SF Brewer’s Guild. Cole is the brewer and co-owner at Black Sands Brewery, a brewpub and homebrew shop in San Francisco. Black Sands often has a SMaSH beer on, so I was curious about how these brews are doing in his restaurant.  

I wondered about the trendiness factor – since creative beers seem to be going in and out of style at such a hectic pace nowadays.

So I asked Cole whether SMaSH is still a thing.

“Duh! If you haven’t gotten on board, you’re behind the curve, to be honest,” he told me.  “The simplest beers are typically some of the best beers.”   

He felt that some of his Black Sands SMaSH IPAs have been as good or better than IPAs made there with multiple grains and hops. And his customers love the idea of learning about hop varieties.

Cole began brewing SMaSH beers for himself, to deepen his education about specific ingredients. “What does this hop mean, what does this grain mean?”  It’s a learning experience for the brewers, but also for the consumer.

And for Cole, it matters most with new hop varieties or the release of the new annual crops.  “I want to know exactly how that hop performs.  It’s a great way to get really intimate with your ingredients.”  He cited the model of Russian River’s Hop To It, an experimental pale ale made (and served at the RR pub) intermittently, exploring each of the latest new hop varieties that come into the brewhouse there.   

This single-minded approach is not going away at Black Sands.  “It’s by far the most important thing we do,” Cole said. “Our Kölsch is a SMaSH – we always have a SMaSH on draft, no matter what.”  

After writing these notes up, I was tempted to look for a SMaSH beer in my own fridge. Even though modern brewing has developed a reliance on using blends of hops and malts and label laws do not require disclosure of materials that are built into the definition of beer, I knew I actually had one,  made with a single pale malt and just Sterling hops.

But I also knew this bottle of beer was not going to give me the desired simple SMaSH effect. A beer from a complex sour fermentation, brewed with wild yeast and lactic bacteria, that pint satisfied another thirst entirely. 

Which may go to show that a single strain of yeast is the unspoken partner of a simple SMaSH brew.  SMaSHaSY?

The next day, I spotted a draft SMaSH beer listed at San Francisco’s Holy Water, a neighborhood cocktail bar with a great beer program.  And, lo and behold, it was from Black Sands Brewing.  Curiously, the name of the hop and malt chosen for what turned out to be an excellent IPA were not listed on the board, and the bartender didn’t have more information. But that was fine with me. 

It was a mystery SMaSH – and it tasted good.

                                                – Gail Ann Williams, co-founder of Beer By BART

PS:  More about the July 2017 round of the Sessions, and more commentary on these simple beers, see host Mark Lindner’s blog:

http://marklindner.info/bbl/2017/07/smash-beers-session-125-round-up/

Want to participate in the next one, for the first Friday of August 2017?  You’re invited!  I’ll be hosting it.  Here’s the somewhat hazy topic announcement.

Explore Beer By BART: Use our list of some of the San Francisco Bay Area’s best beer places with detailed transit info, so you can get out there to enjoy without driving.

The month of March has special significance for beer, arising from March eighth, traditionally International Women’s Day. On or around that date, all over the world, brewers now host women from their own companies and colleagues invited from their local brewing communities in an onsite day devoted to creating a charity beer.

These beers — the result of the Big Boots international brewing effort — are perhaps the most visible manifestation of the Pink Boots Society, a group that has formed to raise funds for scholarships for women working in the brewing industry. The premise is that while the industry skews male, employers are looking for people with education and experience. Many brewers, distributors and service staff are essentially self-taught until they get to learn collaboratively on the job.  So, on the production side, just to get your resume looked at despite your feminine name you had best have formal beer education among your qualifications.

    This year some fine Bay Area brews are on the way! Freewheel Brewing, Laughing Monk Brewing, The Rare Barrel and Seabright Brewery all did group Pink Boots big brew days earlier in the month. 

Freewheel has released their version — “Herstoric Alewife’s Golden Ale” is on at the brewery and will soon be at select taps around town.

Seabright Brewing is now pouring “Nectar of Ishtar” honey wheat ale near the Santa Cruz boardwalk, meant to be a pleasant pairing with BBQ shrimp as well as a subtle nod to the sacred brewing traditions of ancient cultures.

“Pink Boots Prophetess” is the release from Laughing Monk.  It’s coming up on Friday March 31 in SF.  The concept of Lady Grey Tea led to bags of loose tea and orange peels in an ale that just may be your cuppa tea.

The Rare Barrel’s Pink Boots Collaboration, “Solidarity Forever,” is to be released on Friday as well, in Berkeley. The process (including all the microbes that had done the heavy lifting of the beer making to create the blending beers) is described in the excellent blog post by Danielle Byers, who organized a notably democratic process for a large group to discuss and rank choices at several stages. Ad hoc teams creatively dosed small samples with drops of custom herbal tinctures to envision a blend. (The winning combo would later be executed by placing herbs and flowers directly into sour beer and given some time to infuse.)

Zeitgeist in SF will be doing an event with as many of the Big Boots brews as they can bring in. (Watch their announcements.)  Look for more beer bars to jump in.

[Blending day at The Rare Barrel in Berkeley involved well-organized tasting and comparing, finally followed by a full glass of beer to simply enjoy.]

[Seabright Brewery’s Pink Boots brew in Santa Cruz, Ca. Brewmaster Cat Wiest front right.]

    Usually the Pink Boots group takes part in an early formulation discussion. Next, somebody at the host brewery finalizes a recipe so that the ingredients can be ordered on time.  After that, the collaboration day can take many forms.

[Two kinds of honey and huge mesh bags full of tea leaves figured into the brew day at Laughing Monk Brewing, SF.]

• The Pink Boots Society is really important for recognizing the contributions of women in all aspects of the field.  Hopefully also encouraging more women to participate when they see the industry is a little more diverse than they thought.
• I have a lot of communication with the brewer in my role.
• The beer we brewed today is my concept. I like how much you get to think!

Robin Knight, Laughing Monk, marketing and event planning:

• PBS Big Boots brew puts the focus on women and gives us a chance to get a little more woman power into the brewery.
• My take away from today is that brewing is physically hard work and that there’s a lot of waiting, so you really have to love it to do it.

• Seeing inside other work spaces and how they are functioning has been the most eye-opening aspect [of these brew days] for me.
• Today I’ve enjoyed learning about the development of Laughing Monk, from their opening til now, and about their future expansion, not knowing as much about the opening a business side of beer as I do about the brewing side of beer.

Erica DeAnda, Freewheel Brewing, assistant brewer:

• Honestly, just coming together meeting so many women from all different aspects of the beer industry means we can all learn from each other. Whether you’re in sales, a brewer, a bartender — we can all come together to empower each other.
• Freewheel is so English, so cask focused. The techniques used here today were different. Putting the lactose in was interesting. We don’t deal with that a lot!

Jaime Zlamal, Speakeasy, QA lab director/brewer:

• I think Pink Boots as an organization is super-rad. Through networking, we can help each other to go where we want, whether it’s by sharing our experiences or our connections.
• The brew day also involves all of us in something that’s creative and fun.

• Sometimes it’s hard to take a class, due to production schedules. The Pink Boots Society manages to carve out these one day educational opportunities, and the industry sees value in the scholarship program.
• It’s really enjoyable, just on a process side, to see how many ways there are to make beer well. It’s social learning: I learn so much about the bigger picture of the industry.
• I never would have thought about brewing with tea, but it’s a no brainer.

One of the first places we sought out to explore interesting beers was a little restaurant and beer bar below grade off College Avenue in Oakland’s Rockridge area.  Over the years, we dropped by, took pictures like the one below, hung out with friends and eventually tried dozens of beers. One visit to Barclays using BART gave us the idea to list craft beer destinations near BART stations, leading to the Beer By BART website, and many adventures including writing for The Celebrator and other publications.

There wasn’t anyplace quite like Barclay’s, though it seemed as if there should have been. The food was pretty much straight-ahead pub fare.  Many a plate of fish and chips or a burger satisfied kids and adults between dart games and perusal of the deep beer list.   Plaques and mugs hung on the walls to honor regulars past and present.  Now and then a special meal by nearby resident Bruce Paton raised the culinary game.

The last special dinner was last weekend. The establishment was a casualty of rising rents.  Tonight the word is that people will hang out together until the beer is gone.  And then, the community that found home there will evaporate into the night.

Goodbye, Barclays.

A Cooler Way to Go

There are many new venues opening, and perhaps, if we are lucky, some of them may come to provide the kind of home Barclays created for regulars and visitors.  One new gathering place that deserves a visit is The Cooler, the new project in San Leandro’s downtown, on East 14th Street.  It’s an easy, flat walk from BART, under half a mile and under ten minutes for most on foot.  We wrote up a description of The Cooler here.

Industry veteran Jeff Botz, Marin Brewing Company Brewmaster Arne Johnson, and their partner, Eric Keyes, have got The Cooler up and running as a comfortable destination with a fine array of beers you can see on their website.

In this picture, taken just before the opening, Arne is fitting out the draft systems at The Cooler with easy connectors he cleverly customized, so that changing kegs in their roomy cold box area will be simple and swift.

Here’s to new places, new ideas and to remembering the pioneers and the places we first encountered the craft beer community.

Cheers.

The Brewing Network, the podcasters who had the mojo to become publicans, were slapped with the same dilemma all of us in the SF Bay Area had with the Super Bowl in the winter months. It messed up our winter beer schedules, moving SF Beer Week back onto the new Rate Beer Best celebrations, and making the venerable BN’s January Winter festival simply too schedule-conflicted to make any sense.  The solution?

April of course, and a name change to the Spring Brews Festival 2016. And no foolish messing with the first, this festival comes to town on the second, Saturday 4/2. As always the list of brewers pouring is delightful, but just as important, the BN’s fest brings together old friends along with new faces in a delightful park, Concord’s Todos Santos Plaza, easy walking distance from BART in front of their popular pub, the Hop Grenade. This festival has been better run and more fun each year, and is especially appreciated for Tasty’s Tasting Room, one of the best ways to try top quality homebrewed beers from talented local DIY home brewmasters. From the start, brewing demos were part of the fun, along with seeing our beer community hanging out together.

Looking forward to a verdant vernal version of the now-classic annual festival! It’s been a blast every year.

Grab your tickets and check out the list of brewers. We’ll see you there, if not on BART on the way out!

First, the Beer By BART update.  We added sixteen New beer destinations to the Beer By BART home page since last beer week.  Even though this is a personal, non-sponsored, non-commercial list, we are finding that after coming up with the fifty-odd super-obvious candidates for visiting and telling your out of town friends about, it is getting harder to decide which additional places to include or exclude from the long list. We now list about 90 destinations not far off BART (or off major MUNI lines in SF).  And there could be more, to be honest.  When we started this site nine years ago with about 20 entries, we were actively considering any place that included IPAs on tap and kept the beer serving lines clean.

We have loved doing this project.  It started us doing freelance writing for Celebrator Beer News, and other outlets.  We have met people, helped people with vacations and pub crawls, gotten into wonderful converations about the growth of the wonderful community, the creative industry and the growing market segment… and are they the same? Sometimes?  What an adventure the rebirth of good beer as turned out to be for California and especially for the people in the BART counties.  Thank you for subscribing (here or at FB or Twitter) and encouraging us! 

Next, about Beer Week.  OK, Gail here. I’m a football hater, so don’t listen to me about that, but it is seriously disruptive in a negative sense to have to move SFBW from February, as the beer goddesses and spirits intended, up into January.  Like, um, today!   But it had to be.  If you doubted, look at the traffic disruptions the Superbowl will cause starting tomorrow. Not after beer week, but on the first Saturday.

Here’s the official page for MUNI stop changes  They say it could get worse, “With set-up and take-down, transportation impacts may extend from January 23 – February 12, with these dates subject to change.” Some sites are saying to avoid Embaradero BART Station until February 12th.  I hope that’s ridiculous, but you may want to change from BART onto MUNI at Mongomery Station instead.

Looking backwards, in 2009 our blogging about the first SF Beer Week was mainly about getting a lovely seat at the Barleywine Fest, now part of craft beer history. Here’s to all the new, exciting traditions we’ll be looking to repeat next year.

The pleasure of tasting with friends endures. Happy SFBW 2016.  See you around the bay!