Brad Smith asked me to join him BeerSmith Podcast #52, and you can listen to it now.
Thanks for the invitation, Brad.
Month: December 2012
Hey, olllllo, better copyright ‘Two Ounce Culture’
Copyright “Two Ounce Culture,” trademark it, maybe even “Two Ounce Beer Culture” as well, before I pretend I thought of this simply brilliant phrase to characterize the taste, rate, move on mentality.
Rob Fullmer, aka olllllo, posted this yesterday, linking to and quoting from a New Yorker article that is worth the, well, time — which is part of what it’s about. Here’s what he put in bold type:
As soon as we start to think of art simply as something to be consumed, discarded, and replaced, we rob it of one of its greatest powers: its capacity to free us from the grip of easier but shallower pleasures.
I am not suggesting revisiting the chase our tail debate about beer and brewing as art. For me, it works just to replace the word art with the word beer and read the sentence again.
The brilliance of beer is that any particular beer can do this, but without itself becoming the center of conversation.
Saint Arnold Brewing founder Brock Wagner made that point maybe 10 years ago: “We want you to think about what you are drinking. I’ll think about the beer when I first taste it. After that I’m sitting there with my wife and with friends shooting the breeze and it becomes background. But periodically I will think about the beer again.”
Little of that in the “Two Ounce Culture.”
*****
Rob begins his post with a challenge: “I often ask my beer friends and those that claim an allegiance to a beer culture they seem to think exists only in sampling form, ‘What was the last beer that you remember having three in a row of.’ I can tell you my last four of three. It was New Belgium La Folie, Four Peaks KiltLifter, Four Peaks Eight Street and Coors Banquet.”
I thought about this and realized I would flunk. I can’t remember the last time I had drank the same beer again, and then again. Two in a row, that’s easy. That would be Schlafly TIPA. Before that (512) Pecan Porter, and before that Urban Chestnut Zwickel.
One more reason to love August Schell Brewing
This photo comes with a disclaimer (what doesn’t these days?) but that doesn’t change the basics. Me, wearing an August Schell Brewing T-shirt, at Zion National Park.
Schell, of course, is the brewery name on everybody’s lips after Jace Marti’s great post on the company’s Facebook (it drew 150 comments) that provided significant perspective to the “Craft vs. Crafty” kerfuffle.
Schell brews excellent beer, but drinking it will always be better because we visited the brewery in New Ulm. Definitely a “beer from a place” experience. I own the T-shirt (which is looking a little weary these days) because it was a prize given out during judging for the Upper Mississippi Mash-Out in January of 2008. When you signed in to judge that entered your name in a drawing. If it showed up on a list after a round of judging you could pick out a prize. Mine came up rather late, so I was plenty happy to see the T-shirt still there.
A few months later we were at Zion in southern Utah — the final shakedown cruise before our grand adventure. I was waiting for Daria and Sierra to return from a side adventure when I heard somebody behind me say, “I have to take a picture of that.” I realized I was “that.” She didn’t care that the T-shirt was from one of America’s oldest breweries, just about the message, “It’s always happy hour somewhere.”
After Daria and Sierra and returned we headed out I told them about what just happened. Daria made me go back and sit down. The result was the photo you see. Thus the disclaimer.
Another definition of, well, not ‘craft’ beer
Let’s just call it a “good thing.”
The picture to the right made me smile first thing this morning when I saw Jared Williamson’s tweet from a few hours before.
Williamson is a shift brewer at The Saint Louis Brewery’s production brewery, otherwise known as Bottleworks, where they conjure up Schlafly beers. (He also makes a brief appearance in a book about hops you are sick of hearing about.) Somebody should be collecting the Twitter exchanges between he and Jeremy Danner, although like the message with this photo — “This is Irish Extra Stout w/fermcap. 202BBL in a 210BBL tank” — they might be too “inside baseball.”
The events of this morning got me thinking about the tweet itself. Not the words or the photo, but that it even happened.
First, there was an op-ed piece in today’s Post-Dispatch by Charlie Papazian and Bob Pease of the Brewers Association and Schalfly CEO Dan Kopman, headlined: “Craft or crafty? Consumers deserve to know the truth.” This was followed by a press release from the BA: “Craft vs. Crafty: A Statement from the Brewers Association.” And that included a link to a list of domestic non-craft breweries.
“Craft” has been talked to death in the U.S. beer blogosphere for years and now has infected England as well. I can hardly wait to read the same old debate in German and Polish. And, repeating what I typed here last week, this blog exists because I think the “where” (including where it is brewed, obviously) in beer matters. So I have nothing new to say on the craft/crafty front.
Instead, back to that tweet.
It connects us (whoever “us” is, but I think it is more than one guy who lives three miles from the brewery) to Schlafly beer in a way a commercial that costs more than a million dollars to show during the Super Bowl cannot.
That’s a “good thing.”
That some guy who works in the brewery took the time to snap the photo and type the words is also a “good thing.”
That nobody in “corporate” stopped him, that’s astonishing (other than the fact that Schlafly doesn’t exactly have a “corporate,” but stick with me, please). You think a shift brewer at one of the world’s brewing giants is sending foam-soaked tweets from a fermentation cellar? “Don’t let a focus group get a look at that foam.”
In the course of the morning crafty tweet overload, Danner made a fine point about the dangers of defining anything based on “what it’s not” as opposed to “what it is,” but this is an example of something that makes Schlafly-Boulevard-CivilLife-Perennial-4Hands-UrbanChestnut-and-so-in-St.Louis-and-then-beyond different. And it’s a “good thing.”