Month: February 2012

#60 in the books; getting local for Session #61

The SessionThe Session #60, Let’s Talk Growlers, is in the record books.

Now we begin Year Six of The Session in Indiana. (Year Six, meaning we started five years ago. Pretty amazing. “What Goes Around… Comes Around” was atop the music charts.)

Hoosier Beer Geek Matt Robinson asks we consider this question over beer: What makes local beer better?

Of course I think this is a good idea. www.drinklocalbeer.com is one of those stray URLs I’ve given a home (don’t bother with the link, it brings you to the Appellation Beer front page). So to Matt’s marching orders:

We are hosting the March edition of the session. The topic I’ve been thinking about is local beer. The term is being used by just about every craft brewer in the country. What does it really mean though? Is it more of a marketing term or is there substance behind the moniker? This month I want to think about what makes local beer better? I’m not just talking about the beer itself, although it’s the focal point, but what makes local beer better? My connection to local beer is far from thinking that my beer is actually “local.” Maybe you don’t agree with me, and you can write about that. Bonus points for writing about your favorite local beer and the settings around it being local to you.

I just realized that last year for the March Session we visited Urban Chestnut Brewing in St. Louis. It wasn’t local then. We were still paying property taxes in New Mexico. Perhaps I should hum “What Goes Around… Comes Around.” If I only knew the tune. The fact is, though, there are two breweries closer to our house than UCB, and in addition three breweries opened in the months after UCB. Local has taken on new meaning in St. Louis.

Ready for beer in a carton?

Beer in a cartonOK, I’m probably just out of it. This may have already been discussed to death on various beer forums. Perhaps under Innovation, as in “Is this more are less innovative than Green IPA for St. Patrick’s Day?”

Anyway, opening Ale Street News today I sure was surprised to see a full page advertisement for take home beer cartons.

Nothing much at the Crafty Carton website right now (don’t bother with the “how it works” link; I tried), but apparently there will be March 20.

Ale Street has partnered with British ex-pat Luke Dolby to create Crafty Carton, so there is a story in the brewspaper. “The take-home disposable carton has been part of the British pub for over 20 years and I always feel proud when I see one of our cartons on sale there,” Dolby says for the story.

So think of it as a cardboard growler that holds 32 ounces.

Oh, and the advertisement indicates it is bio-degradable and recycalable.

FYI, ‘Hops drops’ contain no hops

Did every local television station get the same marching orders this past weekend? Super Bowl: Go find a beer story.

In Cleveland it was about Mickie Reinhart, who has come up with seven flavors of “hops drops,” liquid additives intended to be used in light lagers. The varieties include chocolate and coffee, as opposed to ones, say “tangerine” or “lychee fruit,” that have drinkers and brewers talking about new “flavor” hops.

Reinhart’s not trying to fool anybody that the drops will turn cheap beer into something it’s not. “These are really good for thin, watery tasting beer,” she said.

Anyway, a few Monday morning links, all from England, nothing about Super Bowl commercials.

* Will Hawkes profiles Eddie Gadds of Gadds’ brewery, who sounds like a poet describing his favorite hop, which happens to be his local hop, East Kent Golding: “When you smell them, you know there is a class about them. They’re not particularly pungent, mores the pity – they’re pretty bloody shy. It’s very difficult to find really good ones and it’s even harder to get the flavour out of them. But if you can do it, it’s great.”

* Simon Johnson has assembled his Craft Beer Manifesto in one spot, after first “releasing” it one Tweet at a time. Use only barley that’s been warmed by the breath of kindly owls. Brilliant.

* Zak Avery poses a question for the ages: “What is a brewer?”

 

Review: ‘Why Beer Matters’ and the long game

Why Beer MattersIn the early 1980s, Anheuser-Busch chairman of the board August Busch III ordered that freshly brewed cans of Budweiser and Bud Light would be cryogenically frozen, so that they could be tasted against each other over time.

More than 20 years later, Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Ellison described a scene where Busch and Doug Muhleman, then A-B’s vice president for brewing and technology, had cans from 1982, 1988, 1993, 1998 and 2003 thawed and set before them in the corporate tasting room. She wrote, “Muhleman . . . says the company didn’t set out to make the beers less bitter. He calls the change ‘creep,’ the result of endlessly modifying the beer to allow for change in ingredients, weather and consumer taste. ‘Through continues feedback, listening to consumers, this is a change over 20, 30, 40 years,’ says Mr. Muhleman, gesturing toward the row of Budweiser cans. ‘Over time there is a drift.’

“The sample cans demonstrate how ‘creep’ works. The difference in taste between two beers brewed five years apart is indistinguishable. Yet, the difference between the 1982 beer and the 2003 beer is distinct. ‘The bones are the same. The same structure,’ says Mr. Muhleman. Overall, however, ‘the beers have gotten a little less bitter.'”

In Why Beer Matters Evan Rail suggests we consider “beer’s unstuck relationship to time.”

Which is why I find myself thinking about beer’s bones. Why when I drink a crappy bottle of Pilsner Urquell it pains me to think about how good it can still taste in the caves underneath the brewery. Why if I didn’t have a cold that disconnected by olfactory system from my brain yesterday — when temperatures here in St. Louis were flat out balmy — I would have been sitting in front of Urban Chestnut Brewing drinking Zwickel, a beer most definitely unstuck in place as well as time.

Beer Matters is first of about Rail’s own relationship with beer.

I can’t explain what beer means for everyone: as a subject, beer is too broad and deep, too varied and multiform, just like the wide public for whom it has clearly come to mean so much. But I can tell you a few things about beer that I like most myself, why beer has come to matter to me, and what I tell people when they ask why I have chosen to write about it.

An allusion to Billy Pilgrim aside, this relationship is an act of free will. He writes, “If the unexamined life has less merit than one which has borne deep investigation, clearly there is some value in caring about what you eat and drink.”

He gives 937 words to his personal obsession with the Polish smoked-wheat beer known as Grodziskie, and part of the story is about how quickly a single beer can disappear.

Despite its recent fall from grace Budweiser hardly seems in such danger. And I don’t really care what a can from 1982 might taste like. But I do appreciate that August Busch III understood why it matters, why beer matters.

*****

Now the full disclosure. Evan Rail and I have been drinking together. He bought rounds. I bought rounds. He emailed me a copy of Why Beer Matters for review. In fact, I bought it from Amazon, in part because we are sort of friends and in part because of curiosity about how the whole “download it to Kindle” would work even though our family does not yet don’t own a Kindle. (We go to the library a lot, plus I read it on my phone.)

The essay runs about 6,500 words, a chapter in some books. You’d like to read it in a beer publication, but find me one that will print something of such length. I have no idea what Beer Matters might lead to from Evan — notice he was “Rail” in the review part, very professional, but this is the personal part &#151 or others. But I hope it’s more.