Dispatch From America’s Beer Paradise

America’s great beer revival has reached drinking age and is showing itself off.

Twenty-one years ago, the first of the new microbreweries opened in the U.S., followed by the first modern brew pub in 1983. Some might turn the clock back even further--to the 1960s, when a change of owners brought fresh energy to the century-old Anchor Brewing Co. in San Francisco.

Today there are more than 20 craft beer makers in Portland alone and more than 1,000 nationwide. In fact, there are now more breweries in the U.S. than in any other country.

There also are more beer styles produced here than anywhere else. Even experts have to scramble to stay on top of the broadening palette of flavors, textures, colors and aromas, both subtle and not-so-subtle, emerging from American craft brewers.

For the benefit of those who want to sample our brewers’ art, beer-tasting festivals are spreading throughout the country--modeled, more or less, on the German Oktoberfest. One of the greatest of these occurs each July in Portland, which is burdened with the title Beer Capital of America.

“Truly beer paradise,” says Thomas Dalldorf, the Hayward, Calif., publisher and editor of a 10-year-old bimonthly named Celebrator Beer News. “A greater range of styles and ‘expressions of brewing’ can be found here than anywhere else in the country. And, indeed, the world.”

The three-day Oregon Brewers Festival, held late last month, attracted more than 80,000 people to a city of 450,000. It was devised 11 years ago when brewers here recognized that if they wanted to sell more, different and better beers, they needed appreciative consumers.

For this year’s festival, 32 local microbrews and 40 more from around the country were served, all on draught: $1 for a two-finger taster or $3 for a 14-ounce mug. Admission to the festival was free, although beer drinkers were required to buy and use $2 plastic mugs. Unlike other events of this nature, there was no judging, apart from the public’s informal comments.

Here are some tips I pass along when you set out to enjoy a beer festival yourself:

* Even those who know and care a lot about beer do not consider themselves beer connoisseurs--and certainly not beer snobs, no matter what anyone says. In May, the Wall Street Journal headlined an article “The New Beer Snobs,” suggesting that some people were becoming obsessed and snooty about beer. This set off a tempest of protest in brewing journals, and beer lovers are still fuming. You can save yourself grief and use the description “beer geek,” which is what the beer intelligentsia use to distinguish themselves from case-lot swillers.

* Beer is big business, and craft beer accounts for a $2.8-billion slice of it, providing all kinds of beer geeks with a way to earn a living. Still, beer-tasting is not something to take too seriously. Not like tasting you-know-what.

* As proof of the above, you do not have to spit out everything that goes into your mouth at a beer tasting. In fact, beer geeks say that at least some of the beer should travel down your throat if you are to taste it properly. Whew.

* Beer geeks advise you to start “little,” with beers of lesser body and alcohol, and ramp up to “bigger beers.” But even those who publish this advice don’t always take it. If you try whatever’s handy, probably no one will think less of you.

* As tens of thousands of college boys prove each year, you can have fun with beer while knowing almost nothing about it. Still, knowledge of basic beer styles can go a long way toward expanding your appreciation and opening the door to geek-dom. For instance, don’t say, “Dark beers are too heavy.” Many dark beers, like British Brown Ales, are lower in alcohol and lighter in body than some light-colored beers, such as India Pale Ales.

* “Ale” and “lager” refer to two basic styles of brewing, based on the type of yeast used and temperature of fermentation--not alcohol content or anything else. Big American breweries label their lager as “beer” and their ale as “ale”; British brewers call their lager “lager” and their ale “beer.” Both ale and lager are beer, but craft brewers do distinguish between them, both on their labels and in conversation. Got that?

* Generally speaking, American lagers are lighter, brighter, clearer. Ales can be regarded, sort of, as less refined, but they tend to have more going on in the flavor, aroma and color departments. Most American craft beers are ales.

* West Coast drinkers, particularly in the Northwest, favor beers with a heavy dose of hops, which adds the bitter flavor. They even call themselves hop-heads. In the Midwest, wheat beers and lagers are especially popular, though drinkers there are not known to call themselves lager-heads. In the Northeast, you are apt to hear beer geeks talk about “malt finishes,” referring to the flavor of the malted barley that is an essential ingredient in beer.

* Despite the above, don’t get too carried away with vocabulary, which is notoriously difficult and sometimes imprecise. Pale ales, for instance, are “pale” only by comparison to stouts and porters. A given ale may be called not only “pale” but “amber” or even “red.” And though lagers tend to be light-colored, some are not. (“The world began in chaos and will end in chaos,” observes Portland beer writer Fred Eckhardt.)

* Retain an open mind or you’re apt to miss something good. At the Oregon Brewers Festival, I drank a Milk Stout that had a texture like, yes, a milkshake. I drank a Wisconsin Red that smelled like--exactly like--a fresh cherry pie and tasted a little like one too.

* You may hear that the craft beer industry is in trouble. Sure enough, success has made for growing pains. Competition is now keener. The big industrial brewers are marketing their own specialty beers, and supermarket shelf space for beer has probably reached its maximum: For any new beer to be displayed, another will have to be pulled off. Some small brewers have failed. But beer industry data continue to show that consumers are turning to craft beers, and the number of microbreweries and brew pubs is still on a sharp curve up.

* And how about this? Beer may fight cancer. It seems that scientists at Oregon State University have found that compounds in hops, the flower used to flavor and preserve beer, seem to act as toxins to certain cancer cells. As with most such research, the findings are preliminary. But why take chances?

* If you want to talk trends, IPA was the fashionable beer style at the 1998 Oregon festival. India Pale Ale harks back to the 19th century, when British brewers made extra-strong beer with lots of hops to preserve it during the long sea journey to troops stationed in India.

* If you don’t need to talk like an expert but want to disappear in a crowd of geeks, wear a T-shirt that says something like, “Save the Ales.”

* Finally this: Whenever anyone drops a mug and spills beer at a festival, the crowd traditionally lets out a cheer. When the cheers start occurring at intervals of two minutes or less, Dalldorf of Celebrator Beer News says, too many of your fellow festival-goers are no longer tasting but just drinking, and it’s time to leave.