The latest from Twitter: @Peace_Coffee plays cupid with “Caffeinate Your Cutie,” @triplerockmpls is serving @surlybrewing Mild at $3.50 a pint, @bittercube celebrates the long-anticipated opening of Eat Street Social, and @Masu_NE will feature a suggestive little Valentine’s Day roll through Tuesday.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Mayor R.T. Rybak recently wrote that the “business of Minneapolis is beer.” With alcohol statutes being adjusted and the brewery boom in full swing, the city’s new brewers face a real challenge in trying to distinguish themselves from one another.
Believing they’ve found the right niche are Eric Biermann (left, above) and Jon Messier (right). Armed with 15 years each of home brewing experience, and Biermann with additional training by the American Brewers Guild, they’ve opened Lucid Brewing in Minnetonka.
Lucid’s focus will be attempting to walk the treacherous line between craft beer flavor and macro-brew drinkability. Their flagship ale, Air, is so light it may not appeal to committed hopheads. That said: Their upcoming double IPA, Camo, definitely will. Camo even manages to retain very a light profile, despite weighing in at 9 percent alcohol.
Currently, Lucid is only available on tap (a bottling line tops their list of future brewery additions). Air is available at Lucid’s current accounts now. Camo was officially released last Friday, and will be proliferating in the coming weeks.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
We stopped by the Minnetonka brewery for a pint of Air and Camo and a quick chat.
HEAVY TABLE: How is it that a brewery can have the phrase “Clarity in Thinking” in its marketing tagline?
JON MESSIER: [laughing] If you have “Clarity in Thinking,” you’ll have “Excellence in Drinking,” because you’ll have a Lucid.
ERIC BIERMANN: You work your job, it’s crazy, you come home, and you want to relax. But then you have the kids, you deal with them and whatever else, finally get them to bed, and then you have that brief moment of lucidity — when you can unwind and relax. It’s about that moment of clear thinking.
HT: In The Tap, we alluded to a “pro-am” brewing program at Lucid. Tell us more.
EB: Jon and I both come from the homebrew world, and there are some amazing home brewers in the area. We’re hoping we can be that place to help them build their recipes, not just for competitions, but hopefully to bring to market.
JM: We did a Kickstarter drive, it was very successful. So we’re going to upgrade our brewery and get another tank to allow for amateur brewing. We can’t just brew crazy chocolate-vanilla bean porters on a whim. But in a one-off batch, paired up with a homebrewer who will share the cost, I mean, why not?
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
EB: If they’re really serious, we can register their brand, help brew some pilot batches, get it out there, and get feedback before doing the huge batch.
JM: And we already have some people interested in doing this. [Lucid] is a dream come true for two homebrewers. Why not help the community that helped us?
Lucid Air
ABV: 4.5%
Style: American Ale
EB: There’s a hole in the market for easy-drinking craft beer -– ones lighter in alcohol that are sessionable. Air has enough flavor to appeal to the craft drinker, but also a light feel to hopefully bring in some Amstel or Stella drinkers.
HT: It is extremely light. You get some malt up front and the carbonation keeps that flavor on your tongue, until the finish, which is very clean.
JM: Even when we sampled this out to bars, they were saying it was a little too bitter to be considered a light beer.
HT: Wait, really? [Note: Air is the least bitter craft brew you’re ever likely to taste.]
JM: It all has to do with perception. For people who are Bud Light drinkers, they’re more heightened to the presence of bitterness.
EB: We kind of had to mimic the bitterness of a macro beer to keep it palatable… I don’t expect we’re going to be replacing Bud and Miller taps any time soon, but we wanted to give people something similar to that if they want something local. Continue reading Jon Messier and Eric Biermann of Lucid Brewing »
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
“Automatically putting green olives in a Martini is like always having to wear a tie when a gent puts on a shirt and jacket. Do what you want and feel like.” -Johnny Michaels, North Star Cocktails
Johnny Michaels’ bartending philosophy is simple: It’s all good. There’s no right way, there’s no correct style. But he certainly has a noteworthy style of his own, which is distilled into the pages of North Star Cocktails (Minnesota Historical Society Press, $19.95, with photos by Heavy Table’s own Kate NG Sommers), a stylish manual that unlocks the secrets of some of the town’s finest libations.
In the early days of American bartending, the very idea of writing down one’s drink recipes was out of the question. A barman’s concoctions and techniques were sacrosanct. To give them away was considered akin to a magician showing the audience the trap door or the secret pocket holding the dove.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
But in Michaels’ case, having his recipes doesn’t even get you half-way home. North Star Cocktails is not Bartending 101. One needs a very well stocked bar to produce one of the drinks at random. Almost all the recipes include some sort of pre-made syrup, tincture, or infusion, as anyone who’s seen the row of plastic squirt bottles on the bar at La Belle Vie can understand. The book would be best used as a resource for batching one or two featured cocktails for a special occasion.
Many of Michaels’ standout drinks from La Belle Vie, Masu, and Barrio are included, interspersed with his commentaries on life behind the bar. Joining his recipes are those from the other local standout drinkmakers who comprise the Northstar Bartender’s Guild. The book is informative, off-beat, self-deprecating, and genuine, just like the man himself.
We stopped by La Belle Vie for Two Tastes from his menu and some sage bartending wisdom. And as any good bartender would have us do, we got right to drinking.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Taste #1 — Handsome Devil
Heavy Table: In the book you write “Every now and then, you get lucky, and for this one, I thank the Powers That Be.”
Johnny Michaels: Yeah, this one’s just over the plate. For the amount of time I think about this stuff — every drink should be that good.
HT: The Devil Mix — how much experimentation did it take to land on the final formula?
JM: Well someone wanted an Old Fashioned for a wedding — not just the standard whiskey, bitters, and sugar, but the muddled one.
HT: Wisconsin-style!
JM: Yeah, but we couldn’t have muddled them fast enough. So I kind of made a similar mix, it still has an orange and cherry in there. I adjusted the EQ after a while, it’s sweet, salty, and spicy with a kick to it. Continue reading Johnny Michaels of Northstar Bartender’s Guild »
Lars Swanson / Heavy Table
Jason Schoneman is making his mark on the Twin Cities beer scene two bottles at a time. In the corner of his St. Louis Park brewery sits a tiny two-line counter-pressure bottle filler. He mentions that he’ll be awake bottling late into the evening in order to meet demand at his two retail accounts. If the future popularity of his beers is at all proportional to their quality, he’s going to need an equipment upgrade pretty soon.
One of the newest additions to the Minneapolis brewery boom, Steel Toe Brewing has already developed quite the following in its first few months. Wednesday evening, we snagged the last two bottles of Steel Toe’s Size 7 IPA from the cooler at Four Firkins. The clerk even intimated (or in his words, blasphemed) that Schoneman’s Rainmaker Double Red Ale gives Surly Furious a serious run for its money. Allow us to be unequivocal — it does.
So far, those who have gotten a hold of his brews have likely tried the Provider Golden Ale and, easily his most popular beer so far, the Size 7 — an intensely juicy and citrusy IPA. “The key with this beer is what I call ‘clean bitterness’ not this harsh, lingering bitterness,” he says. “It’s packed with hop flavor but it’s not over the top.”
Lars Swanson / Heavy Table
We sat down with Schoneman at Steel Toe for Two Tastes of the ales you may not have tried yet. You can taste them for yourself at the brewery tonight for growler sales between 5:30 and 7:30 (he plans to expand those hours in the coming months).
HEAVY TABLE: So, the state government shutdown was unkind to you — there was an issue with an uninspected boiler before you could start brewing?
JASON SCHONEMAN: Yeah, but in a way, it was good for us. We got a lot of work done that we probably still wouldn’t have gotten done. So it hurt production for a bit, but in the end, we’re making beer.
HT: So growler sales are going quite well it sounds.
JS: Yeah, growler sales are great. At Four Firkins, they’re going through four cases a day on the last shipment I sent them. People are really getting into it.
HT: What’s your current output?
JS: In September I was in full production, pumping out beer as fast as I could to have a stockpile. I think once things settle down, it’ll be 45 barrels per month for the first year. Continue reading Jason Schoneman of Steel Toe Brewing »
by Jill Lewis on September 19, 2011
Natalie Champa Jennings / Heavy Table
Apple Crisp with Sharp Cheddar. Honey Dijon and Pretzel. Bacon and Egg. It almost sounds like a menu at a roadside diner, but don’t be fooled. Those concoctions, along with about 80 others, are ice cream flavors dreamed up by Ben Solberg (below, left) and Erik Powers (below, right), the two Minneapolis friends behind Froz Broz Craft Ice Cream. In-the-know followers visit their blog each week to see which new flavor they’ve created and post a comment to enter the contest to receive two pints of the featured flavor. It’s an unorthodox path to a retail business, but one that works for Solberg and Powers as they develop a fan base and perfect their original recipes while searching for the right kitchen space and retail partners.
Solberg, who has a day job in advertising, and Powers, a Culinary Institute of America-trained chef who currently works as a painter for a restoration company, began exploring a culinary partnership a few years ago but hadn’t hit on the right concept. Both had ice cream makers, however, and the friends started a friendly game to see whose ice cream reigned supreme.
“We had all these hare-brained ideas — we were going to do a cookbook, we looked at commercial spaces. We were starting to get serious and then reality hit — we were not ready for this,” Solberg says. “But then my wife got pregnant and I made so much ice cream. I was totally excited about it. Then we got competitive and started playing around with flavors.”
Natalie Champa Jennings / Heavy Table
“Ben and I do our own flavors and bounce ideas off each other. There’s a lot of ill-conceived ideas, but even those often come together in the end,” Powers adds.
Their flavor ideas eventually found their way to the blog, where varieties like lavender honey take center stage. A Solberg creation, the ice cream shares a scent with chai tea — a bouquet of warmth and spice — and slides down easily, with the honey notes following the initial herbal burst. With such a fragrant ingredient as lavender, Solberg wanted to temper its strength but still maintain its distinctive aroma.
“I didn’t want it to be perfumey, so I roasted the lavender. The whole house smelled like it. Once I smelled the lavender in the oven, I knew exactly what to do with it,” he says. “Honey doesn’t freeze, and if you put a lot in ice cream, it changes the consistency, so I put it in in layers. It worked right away.”
As their repertoire grows, Solberg and Powers have learned new tricks for garnering different flavor profiles from the same ingredients. Powers created lavender pistachio honey ice cream a couple of months ago, and while the two flavors’ names sound so similar, the taste sensations are worlds apart.
“I used fresh lavender and steeped it in cream, and it was a completely different flavor — it’s more floral,” Powers notes.
Though Solberg and Powers try to use as many local and organic ingredients as possible, picking up ingredients such as fair-trade and vegan sugar, Organic Valley cream, and Wisconsin-bred eggs at the Seward Co-op, their inspiration comes from a variety of sources, including the South, which resulted in a brown butter cornbread flavor.
Natalie Champa Jennings / Heavy Table
“I was reading a lot of Frank Stitt’s cookbook [Southern Table] and I was really into soul food. He has a cornbread in there, and I love cornbread. Erik had made a banana bread flavor earlier, and I wanted to do something a little different,” Solberg says.
By double-baking the cornbread into crouton-like chunks, it retains it firmness and shape as you dig into the caramely, toffee-like dessert. The brown butter notes come through strongly but don’t take the flavor over the top, instead offering a savory counterpart to the sweet ice cream.
Of course, not all flavors work as well as planned. Solberg’s attempt at a curry ice cream did not win over any fans.
“My mistake was using curry paste instead of curry powder,” Solberg says. “Curry paste has garlic and fish sauce — not what you want in ice cream.”
“It wasn’t inedible, but it was off-putting,” Powers adds. Continue reading Ben Solberg and Erik Powers of Froz Broz Craft Ice Cream »
Natalie Champa Jennings / Heavy Table
Try climbing Chilkoot Hill in Stillwater, MN, and you’ll start to feel the burn around step number four or five. The hill has a 24 percent grade (rising 100 feet over a distance of 700 feet), which makes it treacherous enough to be closed off during the winter. It’s far too steep for cars. Cyclists, on the other hand, love the vertical challenge, and so do the owners of the hill’s namesake, the newly opened Chilkoot Cafe & Cyclery, located a few blocks away from the epic climb.
Tucked inside one of Stillwater’s South Hill residential pockets, the Chilkoot Cafe offers counter service dining (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), coffee, and pastry, as well as bike repairs and maintenance in its adjoining bike shop. The cafe held its grand opening mid-June, in tandem with the Stillwater Nature Valley Grand Prix bike race, whose director, Lee Stylos, is also the owner of Chilkoot Cafe & Cyclery.
According to Stylos, there are three ingredients that make for a great local cafe: a unique, inviting space; a welcoming, informed staff; and a menu that leaves customers with lingering “food memories.” Stylos started working with Chef Michael Moore in December to create that ideal neighborhood cafe. Having purchased a building that had once been a grocery store in the 1920s called Kearney’s Korner Market, Stylos and Moore set to work gutting the joint, reclaiming old windows and floorboards, building a kitchen, and, meanwhile, discussing the menu.
Natalie Champa Jennings / Heavy Table
“We shared the same basic vision,” says Stylos. “Source as local as possible. It’s all about flavor.”
Stylos makes his living as a consultant for medical device companies, but has always had a passion for food, coffee, and cycling. While he’s famous at home for his “Italian peasant”-style pot roast with porcini mushrooms over polenta, the restaurant industry is still entirely new to him. It’s a good thing he’s taken on Moore, who has experience working in a number of cafes and upscale restaurants including The Lowry Cafe, the Loring Cafe, and Auriga.
“I’ve always had a good aptitude for working with food,” says Moore. “I started at the bottom washing dishes when I was 14, and I’ve done a lot since then, working as a server, as a cook, and as a kitchen manager.”
He’s done even more in the creation of Chilkoot Cafe — everything from reupholstering the chairs to designing his kitchen’s layout and researching which local farms from which he wants to source his meat, produce, and eggs. The work from Stylos’s and Moore’s 15-hour days has finally amounted to a place where locals can relax over chicken sandwiches and craft beers, where cyclists can find quality espresso and a good bike mechanic.
Natalie Champa Jennings / Heavy Table
Looking forward, Stylos and Moore will also be brewing three craft beers in-house. They’re working with Steve Streitz (who has the working title of their “Beer Geek”) to create their beers under the name “Velo Brewing.” Once they’ve got their license, Chilkoot Cafe will start developing an IPA, a porter, and a stout. They also plan to organize beer tastings and bicycle events to bring the community together.
“I wanted to create a shop that the locals could come to,” says Stylos. “We create it, throw it out there, and if people respond — great. They’ve found a home.”
We stopped in on a Friday afternoon to try some of the lunch items. Chef Moore was busy on the line, prepping sandwiches and plating salads. We sat down and took in the view of the neighborhood. Families pushing strollers and walking dogs are ubiquitous here, as are the cyclists who sail past the windows — a blur of spokes and spandex. Kitty-corner from the Chilkoot Cafe is Meister’s, a local bar famous for its burgers. Across the street from Meister’s is The Bikery, another quaint bakery / bike shop. Continue reading Michael Moore of Chilkoot Cafe & Cyclery »
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
What can D’Amico and Partners* do at the Walker Art Center that the international culinary powerhouse brand of Wolfgang Puck couldn’t? That’s one of a few questions hovering over the opening this Thursday of Gather, the eclectic new lunch-driven bistro opening in the old 20.21 space.
Gather comes with a number of advantages — the Walker is an internationally known art destination, and in addition to the former 20.21 dining space, the full Walker package includes room for a casual cafe and summertime outdoor grill, plus catering opportunities.
But it comes with challenges, too. The dining space is difficult to access from the street and 20.21 long wrestled with striking a balance between serving accessible food and pleasing a high-end clientele.
The new direction seems to be a bit more casual and less Asian-inflected — the menu includes a grilled cheese sandwich, a turkey burger, and buttermilk-marinated chicken. Local sourcing (defined at Gather as ingredients coming from within 300 miles) is a supporting motif rather than a driving force — although local vendors contribute cheese, turkey, produce, and morels, the relatively short menu also includes halibut, tuna, Virginia ham, and Montana beef. Lunch entrees range from around $9-16, and dinner is a small plates menu, with plates mostly in the $10 range.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Chef Josh Brown has been with D’Amico for 14 years, since starting with the company at age 19. But his roots in food start way out West, where he was raised.
“I grew up in Montana,” says Brown, “in a little town called Havre just 20 or 30 miles south of the Canadian border. It’s way north there. It’s about two and half hours east of Glacier [National Park]. I spent a lot of time out there when I was growing up. It is so, so beautiful out there. It’s absolutely gorgeous.”
Brown and his family lived in town, but spent their weekends out on the family farm. “It was a wheat farm, but it also had cattle and chickens, and things like that,” recalls Brown. “We had about three acres of gardens. There’s 14 of my family members, and we’d go out there every spring and plant everything from radishes and beans and peas and turnips and corn and strawberries and potatoes and kohlrabi, and every weekend we’d go out and maintain the garden. And it’s something where here [at Gather], we’re using so many fresh ingredients that it brings me back to my childhood.”
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
In the fall, Brown and his family would can and pickle their vegetables, and cellar their potatoes. “It’s like The Waltons!” exclaims our photographer, Becca Dilley.
“I know!” says Brown, brightly. “That was literally our food for the winter. And we’d go out there in the winter on the weekends and we’d make bread for the family for the week — we’d come back with three loaves of bread and a can of pickled carrots, and our potatoes for the week… and that right there is where I think I fell in love with food. Just to be out in the garden and see the food and touch the food.”
HEAVY TABLE: Your mission sounds very broad. Is there anything you won’t cook here…? What’s your mandate?
JOSH BROWN: Well, it’s locally sourced and globally inspired. We’ll have a little Italian on here, a little Asian influence, definitely some American influence… I have background at Masa so I like to put a little Mexican food in there as well. There’s nothing we’re really ruling out.
It’s a lunch restaurant, so it’s going to be lighter food — there won’t be a lot of heavy sauces, you’re looking at more vinaigrettes. As far as prices go, it’s probably about $15 for a lunch.
HT: What are a couple of the dishes most representative of your style? Continue reading Josh Brown of Gather »
Recent Comments