Month: February 2011

Whither beer blogs (redux)?

There is something terribly circular about this. What follows is inside baseball, blogging about blogging instead of the beer itself.

I asked last year if anybody really reads beer blogs (other than other bloggers), pointing to a post at Palate Press digging into why wine blogs fail their readers (so don’t have many).

Today Jeff Siegel at the Wine Curmudgeon dives into a report from the United Kingdom’s Wine Intelligence that independent bloggers are one of the least trusted wine information sources in the United Kingdom, United States, and France.

Its study found that only one in five regular wine drinkers in the U.K. trust what independent bloggers say about a wine, compared with more than 50 percent who trust their wine merchant. In the U.S., the numbers were 20 percent and 80 percent, while only 10 percent of the French trusted bloggers.

Siegel went beyond the headline stuff — which caused a major stir in wine blogdom (like here) without most of the world noticing — to find another key number: 84 percent of the respondents in the U.K. said they didn’t read wine blogs.

This is the number (probably different in the U.S., and also different when it comes to beer blogs) Siegel chooses to focus on.

At this stage of the 21st century, most wine drinkers have access to the Internet and are well educated and Web savvy enough so that they can read any wine blog that’s out there. But that this affluent and sophisticated demographic doesn’t even know to look speaks to a serious problem with wine blogging. And it’s a problem that we perpetuate.

We’re too parochial, focusing on too much on the inside baseball kind of stuff that we like and that most consumers could care less about. I enjoy writing posts like this, and I think it’s important that I do it. But they are usually among the least well read posts on the blog. Wine drinkers want wine reviews.

I added the boldface — Siegel links to his most popular posts in 2010 to prove his point.

I suspect beer drinkers are much the same.

That’s enough inside baseball talk. Tomorrow back to inside beer talk.

How do you compare a pils to an imperial stout?

Which 90-plus beer should I drink tonight?

I have not so much made peace with “best” lists as run out of new ways to say why I don’t care for those that don’t provide sensible context. Thus when the latest lists from Rate Beer and Beer Advocate (in its print edition) arrived I sat silent.

Sure, I was amused reading the conversations that followed Martyn Cornell’s “Why extremophiles are a danger to us all” — both the comments on his blog and posts (such as this one) it inspired — but I didn’t have anything to add.

However, by taking a sledgehammer to college rankings in the current New Yorker magazine Malcolm Gladwell provoked a thought.

Gladwell begins his assault by examining the way Car & Driver ranks automobiles, writing the magazine’s “ambition to grade every car in the world according to the same methodology would be fine if it limited itself to a single dimension.” And, “A heterogeneous ranking systems works fine if it focuses just on, say, how much fun as car is to drive.”

Which leads to what the essay’s really about, rating colleges.

A ranking can be heterogeneous, in other words, as long as it doesn’t try to be too comprehensive. And it can be comprehensive as long as it doesn’t try to measure things that are heterogeneous. But it’s an act of real audacity when a ranking system tries to be comprehensive and heterogeneous — which is the first thing to keep in mind in any consideration of U.S. News & World Report’s annual “Best Colleges” guide.

This is not to say that Rate Beer uses the same methodology to compile its lists as U.S. News does for colleges. But it does endeavor to be comprehensive and heterogeneous (even though the top of the list is dominated by homogeneous, i.e. imperial, beers).

And therefore we are left with rankings that imply we might compare an imperial pumpkin beer to an elegant, well-balanced, low-alcohol cucumber beer. Could we would then use this as a guide when choosing a beer? Doesn’t work, does it?

(In all fairness to the beer rating sites they also group beers “by style,” making some homogeneous comparisons possible.)

Anyway, while I was reading Gladwell’s article — which delves into the subjectivity involved in setting “objective” standards — Pandora managed to feed me song after song that I didn’t feel the need to skip. It’s been a while since The New York Times explained how “The Music Genome Project” works, but it’s still a fascinating story. And one you may hear repeated in the coming months, because Pandora has filed for a $100 million IPO.

Some elements that these musicologists (who, really, are musicians with day jobs) codify are technical, like beats per minute, or the presence of parallel octaves or block chords. Someone taking apart Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” documents the prevalence of harmony, chordal patterning, swung 16ths and the like. But their analysis goes beyond such objectively observable metrics. To what extent, on a scale of 1 to 5, does melody dominate the composition of “Hey Jude”? How “joyful” are the lyrics? How much does the music reflect a gospel influence? And how “busy” is Stan Getz’s solo in his recording of “These Foolish Things”? How emotional? How “motion-inducing”? On the continuum of accessible to avant-garde, where does this particular Getz recording fall?

There are more questions for every voice, every instrument, every intrinsic element of the music. And there are always answers, specific numerical ones. It can take 20 minutes to amass the data for a single tune. This has been done for more than 700,000 songs, by 80,000 artists. “The Music Genome Project,” as this undertaking is called, is the back end of Pandora. [Note: The article is from 2009 and those numbers have grown.]

Would it be possible to do something similar for beer? I’m guessing homogeneous would work better than heterogeneous — there’s a reason that Frank Sinatra songs never show up on my Chris Knight station — and finding volunteers for research would be easy.

George Orwell’s favorite (favourite) pub

Back in November I linked to an essay from George Orwell about picking hops. Now Charles in Canada has added an article Orwell wrote about his favorite pub, Moon Under Water.

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its “atmosphere.”

And then there was the Dallas brewpub by the same name. If you blinked in 1996 you missed it. As I recall, it took more than a million dollars to open and caused quite a stir. It closed in, what?, about a month. In a state known for brewpub failures this was probably the most grand.

Reviewing Moon Under Water, the Dallas Observer offered commentary that seemingly haunts Texas brewpubs 15 years later: “Brewpubs are kind of like West Texas cows: It takes a lot of acreage to support even one.”

Which beer is not like the others (III)?

This might have been more fun the first time than the second, but that won’t keep me from asking again. (However, I do promise not to roll out a quiz on St. Patrick’s Day, the next official beer drinking holiday.)

The goal is to identify the outlier and explain why it doesn’t belong on the list. There may be more than one answer, although I happen to have a specific one in mind.

a) Rogue Chocolate Stout
b) Foothills Brewing Sexual Chocolate
c) Meantime Brewing Chocolate
d) Dieu Du Ciel Aphrodisiaque
e) Boulevard Smokestack Chocolate Ale

‘Craft’ beer and degrees of sucking

ABSTRACT

You may declare that a beer sucks because it is genuinely flawed. For instance, you spot the tail of a mouse in the bottle. You might say it sucks because you’ve had the beer before and it was much better then. That’s probably not the word I’d use, but I understand. You might yell that it sucks because it isn’t too your taste. Say it’s a cucumber beer (I’ve picked on pumpkin beers enough). Now we’re talking like people who’ve maybe had a few beers.

THE BACKGROUND

Today Max takes us nicely from Point A to Point B to Point C. Before quibbling with his conclusion and providing a longer answer than fits in a comment at A Good Beer Blog, the suggested reading:

Mark Dredge is promoting a larger discussion about if using the term “craft beer” in the UK is in order. Good comments there, and further chatter in various UK blogs. But I particularly like Barm’s response at I Might Have a Glass of Beer. Beyond the fact it is simply good reading he makes it clear this is not a discussion for Americans to join in. It is about a different beer culture.

To move the conversation along, a takeaway from Dredge:

It (“craft beer”) is a suggestion that what you are getting has more investment than a hefty marketing budget; it has a heart and soul, it’s made for people who prefer taste to TV commercials.

And from Barm:

Everyone knows the beer range of the third-rate microbrewery. There’s the 5.0% boring golden ale; the 4.2% brown bitter that tastes mostly of toffee; the 3.7% session ale, suspected to be the 5.0% ale with more water in it; and the seasonal beers which are the 4.2% bitter rebadged with a lewd cartoon on the pumpclip. I don’t see any reason to dignify this stuff by labelling it “craft”; nor do I understand how, if we are to refuse it the label “craft”, we can objectively distinguish — other than by taste — between it and beers that we like better. In which case, the definition has become “beer that I like”.

Now, on to Max:

Passion could serve well as an emotional reserve when things aren’t going too well, but real success depends on other factors: proficiency, professionalism, seriousness, business talent, knowledge of the market, determination to do things well and respect for the consumer, specially for small brewers.

My quibble would be that it is passion, or conviction, that sometimes takes a beer from “better than good enough” to great. Because the brewer invests in better ingredients and better equipment.

CONCLUSION

The road to excellent beer is paved with good intentions. They are not enough.

Which takes us full circle to the question Alan asked: “Is It Fair To Say A Brewery Sucks… Or Even A Beer?” My comment: To the questions in the headline: Yes, and yes. As long as you are prepared to say why, and why you are qualified to make the judgment.

It was late, so I was thinking quite literally rather than in any philosophical sense (remember that Alan was a contributor to “Beer and Philosophy” and you never know when he’s going to go all Socrates on you). I arose this morning to this fair question: “Who is qualified? What is sucking?”

The comments that followed answer this pretty well. Most beers fall between “awesome” and “this sucks,” although we tend to overuse both of those words. And beer appreciation is subjective.

But there are objective measures, which I was referring to in my literal comment. Quality control is quality control. Were somebody to finance us we could start pulling bottles off the shelf and putting them through their paces. Any wild yeast? Buttery diacetyl (don’t shoot – not always bad)? How’s the dissolved oxygen? There are other measures, but you get the point. Not only could we say, “This beer sucks” but we’d be able to say “This one will soon.” And at some point we might decide, “This brewery sucks.”

(OK, a brewery can’t account for a consumer who buys a six-pack of beer and leaves it sitting on the sunny-side of the car on a hot day for two hours. That beer is screwed.)

It takes just as much conviction for a brewer to focus on process as stuffing “wow” in the bottle. Those are the brewers who invest in laboratory equipment, and people who understand how to use the equipment. That’s easier when a brewery is growing — or “achieving scale” — even if it makes it look a little less “crafty.”

Just to be clear, I still want the “wow” factor (well, sometimes). I’m not abandoning New Beer Rule #4. It takes something special for a brewery to make great beer decade after decade. Certainly passion on the part of somebody. But passion goes beyond brewing great beer. It includes delivering great beer.