The Session #62: Am I talking to you?

The SessionAngelo at Brewpublic hosts The Session #62, asking us to write about “What Drives Beer Bloggers?” You’ll find more confessions there.

The about/mission page pretty much explains why this blog exists. I’m not sure you should care what motivates me to serve that mission (on at least 4.57 posts out of 10), or in fact that want to share it.

So, as is often the case here, I’ll leave it to you to connect the dots between point A and point B.

A) During our Grand Adventure in 2008 I visited Alaskan Brewing. I saw the mash filter they were in the process of installing. I pitched the story to a few beer-related publications, but nobody was interested. I thought this was one of those stories somebody should write about, so when the filter was up and running I wrote about it here.

B) On June 4, 1968, I fell asleep listening to a Pittsburgh radio station broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale’s sixth consecutive shutout. I awoke to the news that Robert Kennedy had been shot later that night in Los Angeles. As I did six mornings a week that summer I headed to the offices of The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette.

Associated Press wire machineI liked to get there by 5:30, so I could pull the paper off the teletype machines before the “wire editor” (his title) arrived. He tended to be way too slow sorting out the sports stories, because he’d probably rather have been working in the sports department just as much as I’d rather have been working in news. Plus he was an alcoholic and I didn’t much care for the phlegm that ended up on the paper he passed along.

On this day, though, I just wanted to be able to stand in front of the machine and watch it type out the news one letter at a time, before anybody else in town would read it. This was news, to me more real than watching television replays of the shooting itself, because it was “real time.”

Beer is not that important. I understand that. I constantly remind you of that. But there are times when I learn something interesting enough I can’t wait for that clattering machine to bang out the next sentence. This blog gives me a place to pass along those stories. Maybe I’m just a beer gossip.1

1 I just checked and the domain beergossip.com is taken, but thebeergossip.com is available.

What next, Imperial Shandy?

Last year during the evening in which Veronika Springer was crowned Hallertau Hop Queen a man with a tray full of one-liter glass mugs stopped at our table, perhaps noticing I had an empty glass in front of me.

I went to pick up one. Roland Bitti, brewmaster at Augustiner-Brä, raised his hand to signal me to stop. He pointed to a slight difference in color between two glasses and spoke a single word.

Radler.”

I took a deep breath and picked up a liter of Augustiner Edelstoff instead. Rookie mistake (hey, it was dark, they looked much the same).

I thought about this today a) when I saw a story on the press release that the Alchemy & Science, the collaboration between Alan Newman and Jim Koch, has created The House of Shandy and that Curious Traveler is its first release. There will be more.

The press release says, “The shandy tradition dates back to the 17th century and is typically beer mixed with a citrus-flavored soda or carbonated lemonade, ginger beer, ginger ale or cider. Today, English publicans pour a blend of traditional English ale with various lemon and lime beverages for their patrons though real lemons or limes are rarely used.”

I expect that beer-mixed-with-whatever purists can explain the difference between a shandy and Radler to me, but I’m lumping them together when considering “beer trends.” (I thought that Germany’s history with the Radler — “cyclist” in German — was confined to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but let’s try to stay on point.)

So b) yesterday Jon Abernathy suggested he might have to stage a “Shandy Shootout” between the new Shock Top Lemon Shandy and Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy. I’ve had the Shock Top (4.2% ABV) and it certainly delivers the lemonade flavor the label delivers.

And before the evening was over c) Jeremy Danner declared it the Year of the Radler.

Yes, this looks like a trend.

I like the sound of ‘North Kent meander’

In a few weeks, the Brewery History Society will honor Peter Mathias, author of The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830, making him its first Honorary Life Member.

You, like I, probably won’t be in London April 19-21 for the society’s annual meeting and surrounding events, but you should wish you were. The schedule is here. The official meeting is at Fuller’s Brewery, which is cool enough in itself. But the following day there’s the “North Kent Meander.” Beer meandering. The best kind.

The news for those you can’t be there is that a special issue of Brewery History, the society’s journal, will include a reproduction in full of Mathias’s The Anchor Brewery: Park Street, Southwark. Written in 1953, this was unpublished until now.

Ken Thomas, curator of the Courage archives, explains in the introduction why the work goes beyond simply telling the story about another brewery. He writes, “although ‘The Anchor Brewery’ is important as it opens a window on the early stages of the study of business history, it is also much more than that. It tells the story of the rise of one of England’s largest breweries against the backdrop of the industrial revolution.”

The society website has information about subscribing to the journal or ordering the special issue.