White House/Pete Souza
After the White House bowed to public demand last weekend and released the beer recipes it had been holding so secretly, it didn’t take long for brewers to announce that they would attempt their own renditions of the Honey Ale and Honey Porter that President Obama has been enjoying.
Two of D.C.’s three commercial breweries—D.C. Brau and Chocolate City—announced yesterday that they plan to mimic the beers that are made with the honey produced in the White House’s beehives. The White House recipes are straightforward enough that any advanced beer-maker should have little trouble concocting their own versions.
Well, count us in, too.
That’s right, DCist is going to make some beer. Like the aforementioned breweries, we would also like to taste for ourselves what the president and the campaign supporters he presents with six-packs have been sipping on. And we’ve got just the brewmaster to do it.
John Lutz is a contractor for the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He’s also an avid home brewer, and the person who mounted the petition on the White House’s website that led to the recipes’ eventual publication.
“It all came about from the D.C. Homebrewers’ Facebook page,” says Lutz, 24, who started making his own beer about two years ago. “It was right around the time some news outlets were talking about how Obama had his home brew on the road with him.”
Stories of the president on whistle-stop swings through Iowa bearing sudsy gifts for lucky supporters prompted an intense discussion among the home brewers about what ingredients—besides the pound of South Lawn honey—were going into the first flagon.
“We talked about the possibility of sending in a FOIA request,” Lutz says.
A beer aficionado in Texas beat them to it, not that the Freedom of Information Act would have done much good in this situation. (The kitchen, under the purview of the White House Office, is exempted from FOIA requests.) Luckily, they didn’t need to go that far. Still, the petition made sense.
“In the back of my head I had heard about the White House petition website,” Lutz says. “Why not come at this from as many different angles as I can?”
There’s also the history of it, a detail Lutz appreciates. Many of the founding fathers were avid home brewers themselves, with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson producing many ales on their Virginia estates. James Madison was so keen on beer, he even proposed in the first year of his presidency that the fledgling United States create a national brewery, complete with its own cabinet-level secretary of beer. (The idea was promptly killed by Congress, an early sign of the frosty relations that have divided the executive and legislative branches since the beginning of the republic.) Still, Lutz is glad to see beer-making back at the White House.
“Obama should be honored to be among such great men and to continue the tradition,” he says.
And now we’re going to try it, too. Yesterday, Lutz and DCist agreed to team up in producing a replica of White House Honey Ale, using the recipe provided by White House Assistant Chef Sam Kass in Saturday’s announcement.
Getting the prescribed hops, malts and yeast shouldn’t be a problem, though we won’t have access to the White House honey. But we’re exploring a few options to obtain a pound of locally made sweet stuff so that even if we’re not using honey from the presidential beehive, it’ll still be made in the District of Columbia.
It’ll take about five weeks to brew and bottle the finished product. Don’t worry, we’ll provide updates along the way. And when it’s done, we’d like to invite the White House for a beer exchange and test our DCist Honey Ale against the presidential brew.
