Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 19, 1995 TAG: 9510190013
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS HENSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Liedtke responds with a question. It's a test.
"What beers do you have?"
Our waitress begins listing what's on tap.
"How about bottles?" says Liedtke.
"Um ...,'' says our waitress, "we have several imports ..." And she lists them.
"Actually, I'll have a Star City Premium Lager," says Liedtke.
"Make it two," I say.
I tried a Star City Lager about a month ago. I had heard that the Mill Mountain Brewing Co. bottled a beer made in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and named it for Roanoke. I tasted it. I didn't like it. I wrote a column about it.
Betty Liedtke wrote a letter to the editor. She's a co-owner of the company and its vice president in charge of marketing. I had bad-mouthed her beer, she said, and she wanted equal time.
She got it. It was a good letter. In it she pointed out that a lot of effort had gone into getting Star City Lager just right, and that readers should make up their own minds about the beer.
It got my attention. At a party a week later, my wife and I decided to try another Star City on her recommendation. We traded sips, and looked at the bottle.
"I don't know what your problem is," my wife finally said. "I think it's pretty good."
If that wasn't bad enough ... so did I.
What to do? Run a correction that says: "Due to reporter error, Star City Lager is OK?"
I called up Betty Liedtke and asked her to lunch. That's how we wound up at Awful Arthur's. She had a theory about my change of heart.
"I think you care a lot about Roanoke and you were being protective of it," she said. "I think you were predisposed to hate Star City."
It's possible, I say. But, I decided to check with one of my "sources" for another opinion. She's not an expert on beer, but she is an expert on me. She's my mom.
In a phone interview, Mom said that she couldn't think of any food in specific that I hated as a child.
"I do remember that you loved fried bologna sandwiches," she said. "Your brother Ned always wanted peanut butter. That was because his jaw kept dislocating. We found that out later. And Will wouldn't eat anything but canned ravioli. But, with you it was always fried bologna."
Oh well.
So, here I am, lunching with Betty Liedtke and Mill Mountain Brewing president Dave Newman. ``If somebody had told me a few weeks ago we would be having a nice friendly lunch with you," Liedtke says pleasantly, "I would have recommended drug rehab."
Now she's telling me the whole story. And I'm listening.
"It really started with Roanoke rather than beer," she says. "It's such a colorful place, so much personality, I just love it here."
Her family moved here from the Chicago area about a year and a half ago. They've settled in for good.
"We decided Roanoke should have its own beer," she says. "We really tried to consider not just our tastes, and what we like, but the people of Roanoke."
Dave Newman says the fact that Star City is not brewed in the valley shouldn't concern anyone. "I don't think we were trying to deceive anybody," he says. "I don't know that we could brew it here, we certainly couldn't bottle it, it's just too expensive."
The process of selecting the brew that would eventually become Star City Premium Lager was pretty involved.
"It's not as simple as saying `I'm going to go taste a lot of beer,''' says Newman, a home-brewer and beer enthusiast for years. "You really have to know something about the process, and the product that you're getting. We wanted an all-malt brew. In other words, it doesn't have any rice or corn or any other additives."
Their final product, after several months of research and development, sounds downright wholesome.
"It just has the four main ingredients: malt, yeast, hops and water," says Newman. "[It's] more of a hand-crafted beer."
Finding their recipe was only the beginning.
"One of the hardest things, that we didn't anticipate, was the regulatory stuff we had to go through," says Newman. That's the Virginia ABC board, the ATF, background checks and even label approvals before the beer could be distributed.
"We've had a lot of obstacles to overcome," says Liedtke, pointing at me. "You being one of them. If it didn't say Star City on it, no one would care where it was brewed. But we wanted this to be a Roanoke beer. We wanted a beer that would stand on its own for its taste. And I feel that you can put this up against any beer."
Is it paying off? Too early to tell. But Newman says they initially bought 1,157 cases, and they're just about ready to order the next truck load.
So, we have a nice lunch. I learn about beer and my guests gain a convert. But our waitress fails her test. She doesn't include Star City Lager on her list of beers. They do carry it at Awful Arthur's. And at the Star City Diner. And Kroger and Harris Teeter and Food Lion. And other places as well. All you have to do is ask.
And if you don't like the full-bodied flavor at first, that's OK. I mean, did you really like the first beer you ever drank? No, beer is the original acquired taste. If tastes didn't change, no one would like beer at all. And then there wouldn't be a Busch Gardens.
by CNB