Hike to the top of your favorite mountain, kick back, put up your feet and you may find yourself thinking that the only possible way to make it better would be with a tall, cold one. That's a dream for many hardcore hikers, and the tale spun by Patrick Tatera, founder of Pat's Backcountry Beverages in Alaska. Tatera thought long and hard about how to make it work.
That meant he'd need a way to carbonate mountain stream water, and combine that with a syrupy sort of "brew concentrate." There are so many variables at play that can make a huge difference with carbonation in general—the temperature of the liquid and the amount of sugar in it, for example—that it's amazing his creation works at all, even if the results are mixed.
The setup, now dubbed the Portable Beverage Carbonator, looks like a futuristic Nalgene bottle. The bottle is $40, the carbonation packs are $6 for 12, and four-pack of beer concentrate is $10. You start by filling the bottle with water and the syrup from a flavor packet. Then you pump water from a secret compartment hidden inside the lid into another compartment—the "reactor cup" which is filled with packets citric acid and potassium bicarbonate—and the fizzing begins immediately. You shake the whole bottle for a couple of minutes, transferring the pressure to the drink, and suddenly, you've got a carbonated beverage.
There are non-alcoholic options. Try making Pat's All-Natural Cola, add some ice cubes when its done, and it tastes impressively like Coke or Pepsi. The lemon-lime flavor tastes like something halfway between Sprite and the original powdered Gatorade. It's nice enough.
Pat's "brew concentrates" are something different altogether. In an overly simplified nutshell, regular beer is typically brewed by adding grain to hot water, adding yeast to the resulting liquid (the wort), allowing it to ferment, then carbonating if necessary.
During that process, sugar in the wort feeds the yeast, and the yeast creates alcohol. Too high a percentage of alcohol causes the yeast to slow down and eventually stop. To create the beer syrup, Pat's uses a proprietary technique it calls "nested fermentation," where the brewers continually add sugars and remove alcohol. It makes for some very happy yeast. Using Pat's method, the brewers add the alcohol back to the mixture at the end of the process. It yields a syrup with close to 50 percent alcohol by volume, which Pat's refers to as a 10:1 concentrate. Combine the syrup, water, and carbonate, and a glass of the resulting concoction has a similar flavor and percentage of alcohol to "normal" beer.
It's enough of a change in the brewing that the packets can't legally be called beer, so Pat's gets clever and calls it "brew." Regardless, there's a ton of potential and it has a much longer shelf life than bottled beer. Brewers could use this idea to create fountain-style beer, similar to the way fountain soda is made from syrup, which saves Coke and Pepsi millions in shipping costs. The work Pat's is doing now with 6:1 ratios allows them to "clone" a beer. (The curious can watch for an announcement about this at the 2016 National Restaurant Association show in Chicago at the end of May.)
The proof, however, is in the packets. After testing the sodas, it was sufficiently close enough to 5 pm to call my brother-in-law, Ben, and start shaking up some beer. I had samples of Pat's Pale Rail (a type of pale ale) and Pat's dark, hoppy Black Hops. I picked up a growler of real pale ale at Seattle's Flying Lion Brewery and, keeping it in the Pacific Northwest, a porter from Tacoma's Wingman Brewers—not perfect matches, but close enough to provide nice comparisons.
Considering that it was squeezed from a tube, the Pale Rail is impressive, sort of like a decent homebrew. The Flying Lion was of course fantastic, full of lovely peach and apricot notes, a balanced bitterness and a purposeful, well-calibrated carbonation. "The Flying Lion tastes more complete," Ben remarked, though he and I reasoned that at 6,000 feet, you'd gladly overlook any sort of defect in the Pale Rail.
