#zoiglhaus

[whatchudrinkin]

How Do You Spell IPA in German?

There are West Coast IPAs, New England IPAs, English IPAs, but no one seems to make German IPAs. It’s not like they don’t have hops in Germany. But few people have tried to use to create an entirely German IPA.

Perhaps the best example of an intensely hoppy German beer is Hopfenweisse from Schneider. It’s billed as a wheat-doppelbock, but the dry hopping and eight percent alcohol make it taste more like a double IPA. The nose is floral and citrusy, despite being brewed with traditional Hallertau hops. The flavor fruity. The wheat adds a lot of body and bready sweetness. If they left it unfiltered and canned it, I bet Hopfenweisse could pass as a cloudy American IPA.

Closer to home, Zoiglhaus has started making their own German IPA. Hopfenbombe is brewed with unnamed German hops and malts. It’s a tasty brew, both more bitter and more malt balanced than many modern IPAs. The flavor is on the piney and herbal side -- more juniper than doug fir -- with a bit of citrus. It finishes with a nice pithy bitterness. 

Zoiglhaus was started by an Alan Taylor who spent decades in Germany training in German brewing school and working in German breweries. He can make a mean Pils. He has a great Kolsch. But you can’t last as an American brewery without an IPA.

Three Taverns Craft Brewery opened in Decatur, Georgia launched in 2013 making Belgian style ales. Now, half their production is an American IPA. Belgian styles make up only twenty percent of their sales. Closer to home, people place the blame on The Commons closing on their failure to make an IPA. It’s literally impossible to open a brewery without brewing an IPA.

It used to be that a brewery could specialize. There were breweries that focused on lager. Breweries that made farmhouse saisons. Breweries that made great bitter. Not anymore. It’s all shades of IPA with little experiments on the side. It’s a sad state of affairs. IPA is crushing diversity in American brewing.

[whatchudrinkin]

Kölsch and Controversy

Zoiglhaus opened a year an half ago in Lents, Portland’s grungy, eastern neighborhood. The brewery is run by noted Germanophile Alan Taylor who studied his craft in Berlin. Zoiglhaus specializes in traditional lagers with a smattering of hoppy offerings to get the kids in the door. 

Zoigl-Kölsch is their first bottled beer. It’s an insanely drinkable beer. Nice bready body, a big whiff of herby, dilly hops, and refreshing. It’s not as bitter or sharp as I was expecting, but that’s fine with me. 

The bottle release set off a little tiff in a very specific quadrant of the beer world. Ron Pattinson put it succinctly in a reply to Jeff Alworth on twitter: “They really shouldn't be using the name Zoigl. Because it isn't fucking Zoigl.”

Oh. You don't know what Zoigl is do you? Yeah. It's an obscure practice in northern Bavaria where the community has a single brewery and different people use it to brew wort which they take home to ferment. When the beer is ready the homebrewer hangs a sign -- the Zoigl, a six pointed star -- on the corner and turns their home into a pub until the beer is gone. Pattinson, and his beer historian friends, are annoyed that Zoiglhaus is using the name to describe perfectly ordinary beer. 

Alworth took to his Beervana blog to defend the brewery, its owners, and American culture in general. It boils down to: Americans borrow from cultures we admire and in the process we change something European, South American, Asian, to fit our needs, thus forming a new American culture. It’s not meant to offend anyone, but that’s often what happens.

It sucks to be Taylor at this moment. He was probably pumped to get his beer on the shelves, and now he’s being accused of cultural appropriation. It’s not like he didn’t do his homework. Dude knows what Zoigl is. He is even planning on making proper Zoigl style beers in his new brewery, dishing out wort to homebrewers to do with as they please. He wants to keep the tradition alive, but since he’s not German, he’s obviously doing it wrong.