Month: December 2009

A few good beer ideas

  • A British pub is hosting a hymn and beer night with the help of a local church. As well as pub customers and members of the congregation the Salvation Army also joined in the festivities.
  • Ron Pattison is offering some of his collected works for sale in hard copy of downloadable form. I can speak to the quality of two of the books. Decoction! is about a lot more than decoction, containing the most complete information you’ll find anywhere about Berliner weisse and Gose (at least in English).

    And Trips! (South) might be characterized as Bill Bryson meets a one-man Yelp. Lots of fun reading, but also plenty of vital information. If you really want to understand beer you need to spend time in Bavaria, and I don’t know of a better book for a beer-focused tourist.

  • The 33 Bottles of Beer pocket book helps you visualize what your taste. It combines the beer flavor wheel and “spider graphing” (which is not a matter of charting spider drinking activity but drawing a “web” that might show you something).

    • Basically, the little book comes with 33 pages, with the bottom of each looking like this.

    It might look a little familiar. I’ve previously posted similar spider charts that graph hop aromas and flavors.

    I suspect you might find yourself streamlining the flavor wheel a bit, but after a few beers — perhaps quite a few, depending on the variety you sample — you’ll have an actual picture of what you like.

     

    A beer niche is a niche is a niche

    The United States was not exactly a beer drinking nation in 1810. According to American Breweries II per capita consumption amounted to less than one gallon per man, woman and child.

    The number grew to about 20 gallons shortly before Prohibition and amounts to 21-plus gallons today. Or roughly 81.6 liters, compared to 157 liters for the Czechs (Bavarians drink about the same amount).

    It depends a little bit on how you define craft beer, but if we throw Blue Moon White into the mix then per capita consumption of craft beer amounts to about one gallon.

    Two hundred years later.

     

    1.3 billion Chinese don’t care about American beer

    No matter how long I think about a story or how many times I might rewrite sections I know when I look at it in print that I’ll realize I could have or should have written some part more clearly.

    Case in point, an article in the current issue of All About Beer magazine headlined “Ameri-Brew.” AABM paid me for my words, so it’s fair enough that I not post all of them here. Very briefly, the “nut graph”:

  • In one of the last essays he wrote in 2007, the introduction to Beer: Eyewitness Companions, the late Michael Jackson argued that “tomorrow’s classics will evolve from a new breed of American brews that are categorized by their admirers as ‘Extreme Beers.’ These are the most intense-tasting beers ever produced anywhere in the world.”

    • The story deals with the implications of that argument. What I should have written better:

  • Call it the Americanization of world beer or simply globalization, but the international beer landscape is changing. Not everybody agrees if that’s good, but few dispute America is at the center.

    • A better choice of words would have been “America is at the center of this change” or “America is the lightning rod.”

    To be clear, America is not the center of the beer world. You can say there is no center of the beer world or you can say the spot you are drinking in right now is the center of the beer world. Same meaning.

    I don’t care if Budweiser does sell for about eight times more than local beers in China. Discerning drinkers around the world are not going to look to Americans to supply all their beer needs, or even to beers that imitate those Americans brew.

    Want an idea of what change looks like in a traditional brewing nation? Read Evan Rail’s recent article from the New York Times.

    What my story in All About Beer didn’t get to is what specific beers Jackson might have been talking about when he wrote “tomorrow’s classics.” Or put another way, consider this comment regarding Jackson’s 1982 list of 5-star beers: “Given the evolution in beer and beer styles, as well as the explosion in American Craft Brewing creativity, I wonder how his list would be different if he were around to do it again.”

    I’m not going to suggest I have an answer, but after a little more research I intend to post a few dots you can connect yourself.

     

    Monday beer reading: ale vs. beer

    Nothing like a few words about beer to jump start your brain on a Monday morning, right?

  • Short read, because this news is so 2005. CNN Money/Fortune just discovered Pabst is a hipster beer. If you do want to spend more time with “retro beer” I’d suggest the article Don Russell wrote last year.
  • Longer read, for which Martyn Cornell provides a “Beer geekery warning: if teasing apart the knotted and tangled threads of brewing history is your bag, stick with me for the next 2,500 words as we range over five centuries of malted liquors and watch meanings mutate.”

    • How long did ale and beer remain as separate brews? Most drinkers, I think, know that “ale” was originally the English name for an unhopped fermented malt drink, and beer was the name of the fermented malt drink flavoured with hops, a taste for which was brought to this country from the continental mainland about 1400.

    I’m not sure that most American drinkers do. Feel free to educate yourself.

     

    Session #35 announced: New Beer’s Resolutions

    The SessionNaked Pint authors Christina Perozzi and Hallie Beaune will host The Session #35: New Beer’s Resolutions (sorry, Mr. B) on New Year’s Day.

    So we want to know what was your best and worst of beer for 2009? What beer mistakes did you make? What beer resolutions do you have for 2010? What are your beer regrets and embarrassing moments? What are you hoping to change about your beer experience in 2010?

    They add, “Don’t be afraid to be revealing . . .”

    Yes, those are the rules in a Facebook world but sometimes being embarrassed the first time is enough and it does not require reliving. We’ll see what I’m up for Jan. 1.

    If you’d like to participate send a link to your post to both christina@thebeerchicks.com and hallie@thebeerchicks.com.