This past summer, Trappeze Pub’s menu started offering another course — but it won’t arrive on a plate.
Eric Johnson has been teaching the Beer Academy courses — which expose different students to the different tastes and smells of beer — at Trappeze since this summer. FILE/The Red & Black
In addition to serving the assortment of foods the bar normally provides to accompany its expansive beer selection, patrons can now actually learn about what they’re drinking.
The class, dubbed Beer Academy, meets in Trappeze and lasts about an hour. For each month, a certain type of beer is selected as the main focus — sour beers were chosen last month, for example.
“Typically at ‘Beer Academy,’ we’ll have 30 to 40 folks that will show up,” said Eric Johnson, the class’ instructor. “And we’ll take three, six, sometimes as many as eight different beers and show how the style is defined.”
It is a difficult undertaking, partly caused by dramatic growth in the American craft brewing industry.
“Back in the ’80s, there were six craft breweries and brew pubs combined in the entire United States of America,” said Johnson, one of Trappeze’s owners. “Now there’s over 2,000. So, actually, the American craft beer industry is brand-spanking new.”
In fact, creative new American breweries are now constantly cooking up beers that defy categorization, a process which brewers from other countries are actively trying to emulate. This, combined with the lack of a rigid definition of what constitutes a certain type of beer, has resulted in a cavalcade of choices that could leave the uninitiated a bit bewildered.
Still, Johnson is an able teacher. For the most recent session, before a particular smoked porter was served, he said, “We had little jars of all the different grains, so people were able to taste and smell smoked malt, taste and smell the different hops, and so forth.”
The process was intended to help attendees identify the ingredients later when they were tasting them in the beer. That kind of hands-on experience and engagement can go a long way to helping students get a grip on different kinds of beers, which will ultimately help them make better beer-buying decisions.
“The more knowledge that they have, the more comfortable they’re going to feel with what they’re ordering; the more confident they’re going to feel,” Johnson said.
Jamie Potterf, a server at Trappeze, has attended previous Beer Academy events, and said Johnson is excellent at fielding questions after his initial lecture.
“If you don’t understand something, he can go back and reiterate, or go in depth about it,” she said. “He knows everything.”
The topic for this month’s Beer Academy has not yet been made official, but Johnson said that it “almost certainly would be Christmas Beers.”
It is a very broad category, he said, but, “90 percent of the time it’s going to be, you know, a darker color beer that has moderate-to-high alcohol … and has nearly always been spiced.”
Different types of fruits are usually incorporated as well, Johnson said, as the beer is intended to be “something you would enjoy drinking with, say, a fruitcake.”
Much like the the retired University class, Beer Academy is intended to give people the chance to delve deeper into the subject in a moderated setting. In an effort to give customers more opportunities for a similar learning experience, Trappeze has also just added classes covering wine and liquor, which occur on the second and third Mondays of every month, respectively. Nancy Palmer, a restaurant consultant and writer who leads Trappeze’s new course on wine, said though the events involve tasting and drinking alcohol, the main purpose is having an “open forum” so attendees can air their questions.
Ultimately, as Potterf said, “[Beer Academy] is about learning.”
BEER ACADEMY
Where: Trappeze
When: 7 p.m.
Price: $14