More Near Beer-Menabrea 150 Anniversario Ambrata

I guess it's inevitable. An explosion in beer creativity is bound to lead to a lot of people stretching the boundaries. We can expect:

• good beer from places where beer was never good before
• beer that doesn't taste like the beer we're used to tasting
• a lot of questions about what beer is

Sudden shifts in definition have been around before. There was a moment in American history when beer containing less than .5% alcohol were the only legal game around. They were called 'near beer'(although whoever called it that was widely thought to be a poor judge of distance). For more on this aberration, may I refer you to  http://bit.ly/shortbeer.

I'm proposing reviving the term in a gentler, less judgmental way to refer to experiments that look like beer, and are marketed as beer but lack the sense of balance that we've come to associate with beer. Being both old and inclined to snobbery, I may never actually enjoy any of these drinks, but the world is moving so let's taste it as it goes.


Yesterday, at the pleasant In Riva in Philadelphia, we got to try Menabrea 150 Anniversario Ambrata from Biella in Piemonte. The bronzed, maple-syrupy color is completely congruent with this malt-heavy medium-bodied near beer. There's barely a trace of bitterness or acidity and the effect in the mouth is like a sophisticated soft drink: charming and sustaining. As far as we could tell, there was no food that would be a suitable companion.

So what's going on here? From the producers' point of view, there's a craft beer explosion in Italy right now and Italian creativity is getting an airing at breweries throughout the country. Tastes are changing, laws are being defied and rewritten. Brewers are using chamomile, spelt, peach jam, chestnuts, green pepper, pomegranates and hazelnuts.
For us consumers, it means that smart beerlist-makers are going to be using all this variation to bring interesting new beer to the table. There's a chance that our country, with its oversupply of Italian-themed restaurants will soon be seeing a flood of Italian-made beers, some carefully picked. It also means there will be a lot of amusing dead ends.