Sunday, July 13, 2008
Food, "Behind the Bar"
Hop to it
Athens beer aficionado on the new frontier of craft brews
Courtesy of Owen Ogletree
Owen Ogletree at the Globe pub in Athens, Ga. By Hope S. Philbrick
“Beer enthusiast” doesn’t quite encompass Owen Ogletree’s passion for the brew; “beer guru” might be a more appropriate label. Based in Athens, Ga., Ogletree operates the Atlanta Cask Ale Tasting and Classic City Brew Fest, is a certified national beer judge, beer traveler and award-winning homebrewer, and authors beer columns for Southern Brew News and Athens magazine. The Sunday Paper recently talked to this rising beer-drinking star.
Q What sparked your interest in beer?
A Well, back in the ’80s, I was a high school biology teacher and would travel to Europe over the summer. After sightseeing all day, I’d go into pubs and try beers. I wondered why beer was so different over there and had so much more flavor and many different colors. I started reading about beer, about how to make it myself at home. I enjoyed it so much that I opened a homebrew shop in Athens, which I ran for three years. Having that is how I started doing the Classic City Brew Fest and met beer-loving people in the area. It snowballed from there.
What are the biggest misconceptions about beer?
There are several. I’d say that the biggest misconception about beer is that most people think it’s just a fizzy yellow drink without character that’s good for nothing but quenching your thirst after mowing the grass. It’s not that way at all. There’s a wider profile of beers available than in wine. And there are lots of different ingredients that go into beer compared to wine. Beer is really complex, goes really well with food and is much more diverse than wine. Don’t get me wrong, I love wine and it’s a great beverage. But people don’t really understand what beer is, whereas everyone knows that wine is fermented grape juice. It’s much more complicated to take a starch and convert it into a fermented sugar. In the history of the world, people added all kinds of herbs and spices to balance the sweetness in beer. The most popular balancing agent has been hops, which grow on vines and are native to Europe. Hops have a really spicy acidic quality that has a bitterness that balances sweetness and gives beer really big flavor. Hops isn’t a grain; it’s the flower of an herb. There’s a shortage of hops now due to a variety of factors including a warehouse burning down, bad weather, bad growing conditions and demand that has increased exponentially. It will take a few years to get the hops crop [to meet] demand.
What are the current beer trends?
In the United States, there’s a growing trend toward craft beers that have more flavor than the standard yellow mass-market beers. Sales of darker, richer, more flavorful microbrew beers are on a steady increase. I think it’s a natural progression. People are realizing there are better foods than hamburgers, better bread than white bread, better coffee than Folgers. And once people try different styles of beer, they get hooked pretty fast if they like beer.
Hoppy beers are a big trend. In the ’60s and ’70s, you could barely detect hops. In the 1900s, before Prohibition, beers were very bitter and spicy, but people lost their taste for that and started putting few hops in beers until the ’70s. Nowadays, very hoppy, bitter, spicy, citrusy and floral beers have really caught on, especially on the West Coast. It’s making its way to Georgia and the Southeast pretty rapidly. Big beer trends start on the West Coast, where there are more adventuresome people willing to try new foods. Hoppy beers were popular in the ’80s and ’90s out there, and it’s taken awhile for those trends to catch on in the Southeast. The Southeast is the new frontier of craft beers. This is the place to trailblaze, a wide open market. SP
To keep informed about upcoming beer events throughout Georgia, sign up for Ogletree’s electronic newsletter. Learn more by visiting www.classiccitybrew.com and www.brewtopiaevents.com.