The Way Beer Styles Evolve
The Portland link in the Rock Bottom chain announced its closure on the morning of October 28th. That afternoon, Van Havig was there to grab the 25 years of collected brewing logs—entirely complete from 1994 through 2019, save for the first ten brews, which were lost to antiquity. Van was the head brewer there from 2000-2011 before quitting to start Gigantic with Ben Love. [Van corrects what shouldn’t need correcting in comments: he was fired. I regret the error.]
They are absolutely fascinating reading. Van plans to ship them down to OSU’s brewing archives, but I’m going to take a deeper look at some point before he does. The reason: even in a brewery that was owned by a cautious corporation and attracted behind-the-curve drinkers (even in its heyday, Rock Bottom was never the Great Notion of Portland), we can trace the evolution of an industry. There is so much to describe, but here’s one small example that illustrates how early brewers were working with techniques that would come to define American craft brewing. Let’s have a look at brew 700, Oatmeal Pale Ale.
There is no such thing as a standard brew log; every brewery has their own version, so it can take awhile to figure out what you’re looking at. Let me direct your attention to the interesting bits by zooming in and highlighting two things:
This is by no means a modern hoppy ale. It was brewed during a time when Cascades were the signature hop of the West Coast—ages before Citra, Mosaic, Galaxy, El Dorado, and the rest would redefine the flavor ranges of hoppy ales. And yet, look at the hop schedule.
By this phase in Rock Bottom’s evolution, hop schedules were already shifting radically. In the first batches from the 90s, the process was fixed for all beers—an addition at the start of boil, another a half hour in, and an aroma addition five minutes before flameout. Bitter charges were robust. But by 2001–eighteen years ago—Van was already trying to push his pales and IPAs away from bitterness and toward flavor and aroma. He used a modest bitter charge of Santiam, presumably because it was supposed to have “noble” character and a smooth bitterness. But three-quarters of the hops used were added at the end of boil. As I flipped through later batches, I saw that he moved this charge from five minutes to the end of boil to flameout.
The grist is also interesting. I’d sort of forgotten about the use of oats in pale ales, but it was a minor trend in the Northwest. I think the first to pioneer this was Mike Hale of Hale’s Ale, who wanted to replicate the creaminess of Boddington’s—and he put his on nitro. That idea, of a fuller, sweeter base on which to float a floral, zingy dose of hops, goes back decades. That’s why oats are a key ingredient in many hazy IPAs, of course—to help create a velvety texture in the mouth. Van would later rename this beer Velvet Pale Ale.
Brewers are smart and if one has thought of a technique in their brewery, there’s a very good chance another has already tried it. IPAs only became a national phenomenon in the late aughts, but development of the techniques that made them popular were happening brewery by brewery all over the place. (Brewers talk to each other, too, especially in national chains, and that spreads discoveries.)
I’ll dig through these a bit more and see what other discoveries surface. I expect to find a lot of fascinating stuff.