Beer brewing bursts with new diversity

Perhaps never in the nation's brewing history have so many beers in so many permutations been made.

Whether a beer has more flavor or is less filling is just the start of deliberations as people belly up to the bar.

"There's tremendous diversity in beers these days, among the small guys and the big guys alike. They're all looking for new openings," says Charles Bamforth, chair of the department of food science and technology at the University of California, Davis, as well as the university's Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Brewing Science.

Beers are being brewed with such exotic ingredients as chili peppers, wasabi and ginger. They're being aged in used wine barrels. They're being inoculated with a strain of yeast that gives them a pungent horsy or barnyard character, repulsive to some, savored by others. There are gluten-free beers and smoke-flavored beers.

If the new beers share anything in common, it's an acquired taste for their extreme characteristics, such as the intense floral bitterness of more hops than usual, the pronounced notes of chocolate from an additional measure of roasted malts, or the fruit, berry, spice, bean or herb with which brews are being made.

"People are being adventuresome," says Brian Ford, a longtime brewmaster at Beermann's Beerwerks Brewery of Lincoln and Roseville and who is now owner of the new Auburn Alehouse Brewery and Restaurant in Auburn, Calif. "They are looking for a new style."

Other brewers also spoke of the growing allure of double and triple IPAs -- India pale ales with more pronounced hop aroma and flavor and more alcohol, about twice as much as standard pale ales.

"Anything that says a beer is higher in alcohol and is bigger and bolder is where the buzz is right now," says Jay Marshall Prahl, brewmaster at Sudwerk Restaurant & Brewery in Davis, Calif.

Overall, brewpubs and other members of the specialty-beer trade have recovered strongly from a shakeout in the industry about a decade ago.

At that time, the nation had nearly 1,100 brewpubs, microbreweries and regional specialty breweries. Then sales went flat, and breweries and brewpubs began to close.

"The industry was growing so rapidly that the market got flooded, and not everyone was focused on the quality side of production," says Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association in Boulder, Colo., a trade group for craft brewers.

Today, the nation has 1,370 specialty breweries, including 958 brewpubs. Sales of handcrafted beers grew 17.8 percent during 2006 and were up 11 percent through the first half of 2007. So far this year, 33 brewpubs, microbreweries and regional specialty breweries have opened, while 10 have closed.

Of the nation's total annual beer sales, craft brews account for 3.6 percent of volume, 5.4 percent of value.

How many different beers are being made is anyone's guess, but Bamforth isn't happy with the growing number. He'd rather the trade stick to a few traditional styles of beer and explore variety within each, taking advantage of different regimes of hops and malts but avoiding the array of other ingredients and techniques being used today.

"I wish brewers would stay with a limited number of beer styles, and make the most of those, like the wine guys have done with their red, white and pink wines," Bamforth says. "Let's make ales, and then celebrate diversity within the ales, like with different hops. Let's stop looking for the exotic."

Eventually, it could come to that. But for now, many beer enthusiasts are keen on novelty in their brews.