From 6/28/06 Oakland Tribune
by William Brand
HOW DO YOU top a beer named "HE'BREW" that shows a bearded, dancing Hasidic Jew wearing a red fedora on the label, when you want to create a 10th anniversary brew? For Jeremy Cowan, founder of Shmaltz Brewing Co., it was a no-brainer.
After all, the San Francisco entrepreneur has made HE'BREW: The Chosen Beer and Messiah Bold household words among people with a sense of humor who like beer, not to mention his annual Hanukkah beer - Jewbelation.
He went straight to the Torah for Genesis 10:10 . It is an all malt beer, a blend of barley and wheat, fermented with pomegranate juice - a fruit from the Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible. Oh, and for kicks, he made it 10 percent alcohol, almost as strong as beer gets and added a whopping hop package that includes mild Warriors, floral Centennials, Cascades with their grapefruit nose, spicy Willamettes, Simcoes with their piney notes, flowery Crystals and pungent, Mount Hood hops. The pomegranate juice brings a pleasing dryness to this beer, making it just right for an after-dinner drink. And pomegranates are indeed biblical: "For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey..." That's Moses speaking from Deuteronomy 8:8.
Cowan, who grew up in Menlo Park, says the idea to use pomegranate juice goes back more than 10 years, when he was formulating his first beer recipes. "I was looking for a way to use ingredients with Jewish roots," he says. "There's this passage in Exodus, Moses sends these guys - the spies - to check out the Promised Land. They come back and report they saw a land flowing with milk and honey. They bring back these seven special things, wheat and barley and fruits, including pomegranates." "We squeezed the pomegranates on the floor of my loft in the Mission for the first batch," he says. Cowan had worked as a bartender and at a brewpub, but he wasn't a brewer, so he took his beer to a now-closed, brew-on-premises shop in Mountain View. The brewer in charge, Simon Pesch, was good at his craft. Today, he's head brewer at Pyramid's big Berkeley brewery.
The first HE'BREW eschewed pomegranates. Cowan recalls it was a fairly traditional English style ale. He loaded the first batch of bottles into his grandmother's old station wagon and trundled around the Peninsula and San Francisco, selling to retailers. The beer that began as a joke between a couple of high school friends in the 1980s, took off. The brew-on-premise couldn't keep up with his orders, so he moved production to Boonville's Anderson Valley Brewing, king of the hop world. Sales boomed and three years ago, he moved production to Mendocino Brewing's facility in Saratoga, N.Y., where all HE'BREW beers are made these days. So what about the name: Genesis 10:10? Sounds Biblical. I pulled out my copy of the Torah. Turns out Genesis 10:10 is a recounting of all the descendants of Noah, long after the great flood. "Genesis 10:10, it's all about new beginnings," Cowan says. This is going to become an annual beer, he adds. Each year he wants to use another Biblical ingredient. In 2007, it's going to be figs, he says. Figs? Believe it. But one 10 percent alcohol beer's not enough for Cowan. He's also releasing a second 10 percenter: Bittersweet Lenny's R.I.P.A., honoring the Jewish comedian Leonard Alfred Schneider, known to all of us as Lenny Bruce, the irreverent guy decades ahead of his time, who died of a drug overdose in 1966.
This is a huge beer and...this is one I intend to tuck away for a few months, letting the malts blend. By December, it should be great. I [won't] rate it this minute, but stars for ingenuity, using rye in a big beer and naming it to honor Lenny Bruce.
I've always been a Lenny Bruce fan. This is a quote from filmmaker Ingmar Bergman: "His only offense was that he dared tell people the truth."
For a look at all HE'BREW beers, check out our blogs: http://www.beernewsletter.com and http://www.insidebayarea.com/beerblog.
Staff writer William Brand publishes What's On Tap, a consumer craft beer and hard cider newsletter. His column runs every other week. Write him at whatsontap@sbcglobal.net or P.O. Box 3676, Walnut Creek, CA 94598, or call (510) 915-1180.