Month: October 2010

The ‘perfect’ beer & Gatsby’s green light

My favorite paragraph of the week, and I think you can connect the dots to beer:

“Robert Parker is no dictator. He is a storyteller. The magnetism of his prose is that of J.K. Rowling’s, too: you’re first presented with a set of familiar facts and situations, and then, slowly, you’re seduced into suspending reason and believing in the perfectly impossible. Escape into a Parker review, and for a few sentences, there you are, back in junior high, the great critic’s palate—and yours, too—cured of its nagging mortality. In this counterfactual place, there is no perceptual bias, just perception. There is no confidence interval, just confidence. Parker’s 100-point wine is Gatsby’s green light, the orgiastic ghost of taste’s future, the tongue a sudden lattice of infinite resolution, the nose a sudden instrument of preternatural whiff.”

– From Robin Goldstein’s review of Parker’s Wine Bargains: The World’s Greatest Wine Values Under $25. It might be a little wine centric for you on the whole, but the last few paragraphs are scrumptious.

‘Europe’s convivial drink!’

When do you know you’ve had at least one too many?

When you quit even trying to pronounce convivial and admit you should have stuck to session beers.

Today the Wall Street Journal examines “The Future of Beer in Europe.” Which isn’t looking all that great. Interesting timing for me since I just started reading Dethroning the King: The Hostile Takeover of Anheuser-Busch definitely more a book about business than beer.

I expect to make a serious dent in it tomorrow during my flight to Houston for Dixie Cup XXVII.

Anyway, Matthew Dalton writes, “the message is that ‘convivial’ drinking occupies a middle ground somewhere between not drinking at all and drinking so much that you collapse on the street in a pool of your own vomit.”

That’s the sweet spot I’ll be aiming for in Houston.

Session #44 recapped; Session #45: Wheat

The SessionThe Beer Wench has posted her recap of The Session #44: Frankenstein Beers. And BeerTaster.ca has picked the topic for #45: Wheat Beers.

Before I use the opportunity to delivery a plug you had to know is coming, here are the details: “We wanted to get back closer to the roots of the Session and pick a topic which was simple and yet gives a wide range of interpretations so we chose, simply (or perhaps not so simply), Wheat Beers.”

Feel free to hit fast forward because here comes the not-so-subtle advertisement: Hope I can find a good book to help me prepare for the Nov. 5 gathering. (Given that the Beer Bloggers Conference starts that day do you think there will be a record turnout or that everybody will be too busy drinking beer in Boulder?)