The Saint Louis Brewery Tap Room, the brewpub where Schlafly beers were first brewed, at this moment serves a beer called Optic Golden Ale. It was made with floor malted Optic barley grown in Scotland and Aramis and Strisselspalt hops from the Alsace region of France.
Will The Oxford Companion to Beer provide further detail?1
Indeed, the book delivers. You can look up:
– Floor malting.
– French hops.
– Optic (barley).
– Strisselspalt (hop).
Additionally, the index indicates the entry about Kronenbourg Brewery has information about Strisselspalt.
One question. Four (or five) answers. The Companion’s breadth is apparent. Upon further reading, however, a question arises. On page 377, the French hops entry states, “Strisselspalt is the region’s main cultivar, but its origins are rather obscure.” On page 522, the Kronenbourg entry states, “The flagship brand is Kronenbourg 1664 . . . brewed with Alsace’s native Strisselspalt hops.” And on page 772, the Strisselspalt entry states, “Its profile resembles Hersbrucker Spät [from Bavaria], also a landrace, from which Strisselspalt is thought to be derived.”
To recap: a) it’s native to the Alsace, or b) it’s the child of a Bavarian hop or c) nobody knows. Which is it?
Within its own pages The Companion includes contradictions that undermine the notion it is as authoritative as it is comprehensive. A reader doesn’t need to know much about beer or have visited the OCBeerCommentary to come to that conclusion. This is disappointing because, at least within the niche inside of a niche I sometimes find myself, it has changed the conversation.
The Companion does an excellent job of telling the story of beer today. It can provoke fireside-beer-sipping contemplation. It provides ideas to take to the pub for further debate. To repeat myself, the breadth is impressive. So is the academic rigor. At least most of the time. I think. Well, let me look that one up.
My apologies, but one quick personal story that addresses my personal bias. When I was 17 years old and working my first summer fulltime in the sports department at the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette I filled out my work week by doing “rewrites.” That is typing handwritten missives from correspondents in outlying small towns. Mostly news about upcoming church picnics, who was entering what in the county fair and upcoming high school reunions.
Bill Schmelzle was the city editor and he scared me a bit. Maybe it was the cane, or that I sensed he didn’t like mistakes. One Sunday afternoon not long after I started we were alone in the newsroom. It was hot, the windows were open and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. This made him even more intimidating.
He held up a sheet of newsprint. He asked if I used the slug “hiero” on the rewrites I typed. What was I going to do, say I didn’t? I gulped and said yes. “Did you check the names?” he asked. I went to look for the handwritten copy. No, he said, against the phone books in the office “library.” The rest of the summer you can be sure I was going say yes if I was asked that question again.
A few years later I became city editor. This was a long time ago, when stories were cast in lead on linotype machines, proofs were drawn and people who worked in typesetting read the proofs. Most of them were women who could have been my grandmother, who lived in the surrounding small towns and otherwise might have been the correspondents whose work I typed up. One time one of them came out to the city desk. She explained to me that she was tired of correcting a particular name that kept popping into the news. Turns out we were checking it against the phone book. Problem is the phone book was wrong. She knew this because he was her neighbor.
Mistakes happen, and when you are writing a book they happen in ways that you can’t imagine. Something might have been correct the first 54 times you looked at it, a well meaning editor “corrected” it and you just didn’t read it carefully the 55th time. But in a book of this weight shouldn’t somebody have noticed? Not just little stuff, but big, and big picture.
The conversation changes.
It doesn’t change for those unaware of the book’s shortcomings. That’s not altogether bad, because at its best this is a damn fine book. Just not one that should be appearing in the footnotes of somebody’s doctoral thesis.
*****
One more aside, about the OCBeerCommentary. In order for it to have “value” you really need to own the book. And, in fact, it does have additional value beyond correcting errors. Alan McLeod noted at the outset he hoped contributors would add detail that goes beyond the book, and they have. It’s also interesting that there was chatter early about the rate of pay for entries. And now those just interested in seeing beer history “done right” are putting in considerable effort for no pay.2
1 In case you were wondering, this is not a set up. When I drank the beer I thought, “I wonder was The Companion might tell be about this.” I didn’t look for examples until I found one that suit my purposes. Although I’m not above that.
2 It’s also been suggested it would be best to wait for the next edition (three years or more). In fact, Oxford could clean up a ton of inconsistencies and small fact errors by making the sort of changes that are easily done from from one printing to the next. Hope they send Alan a thank you card.
Second the thank you card to Alan. I haven’t yet held the OCB in my hand, but the OCB corrections wiki was a timely, respectful, and brilliant way to move the book towards its goal. Big ups to him for setting up that community service.
Wooooooooooooooot!
Frankly, I thought it would be my only little toy – with me sending emails to Stan every few days saying “check out my wiki, Stan…” to which I would receive the occasional polite response.
That’s because I was busy connecting contributors and entries. Now that I have time I am smiling to see Martyn Cornell’s name when I check out recent changes.
Stan, this raises a thought that had not heretofore occurred to me. I wonder to what extent the errors in the OCB are a result of changes in publishing. As we all know, book publishing is dying. (Such a heartening thought for someone writing a book.) Books are not dying, but the kind of publishing that allows people to sit in nice offices in Manhattan and earn $100,000 to edit things is.
Once upon a time, publishers did a lot more than set type. Editorial oversight has gone in the toilet, largely because it’s so expensive to keep someone on staff who checks all the things that must be checked to make sure the kind of inconsistencies you cite don’t happen. If a book is an iceberg, the manuscript was at one time the tip–the fact-checking, editorial guidance and oversight, and general support were the rest of picture.
I have no idea how Oxford operates, but you have to assume they’re suffering budget cuts like anyone else. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have three origin stories for one hop variety.
And just to add something to your initial question Aramis is a new hop variety that Peter Darby has developed in France.
“I have no idea how Oxford operates, but you have to assume they’re suffering budget cuts like anyone else.”
Budget cuts or not, OUP’s business model has produced record profits for the past several years:
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Profits surge at OUP
28.07.11 | Lisa Campbell
Oxford University Press has described a surge in pretax profit by nearly 25% as “excellent”, but said it does not underestimate the challenges publishers are facing.
The academic publisher has reported pretax profits of £122.6m in the 12 months to 31st March 2011, up from £98.5m last year. The company also increased sales by nearly 6%, to £648.6m in that period, up from £611.9m last year.
Source: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/profits-surge-oup.html
See also: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/profits-81-oxford-university-press.html
*********************************
That means they’re booking almost $190,000,000 in *profit* this year.
That’s up from about $150,000,000 in *profit* last year.
In 2009 they had a then-record net profit of £84 million pounds, or about $140,000,000 in *profit* for the year at the time.
They might have had “budget cuts,” but let’s keep those cuts in perspective. OUP is raking money in through the door, windows and chimney.
What they choose to do with that money remains their business. My opinion was — and is — that more of it should be shared with their contributors. (Or perhaps to pay for one or two of those “so expensive” fact-checkers Jeff mentions.) But if OUP can bank $190,000,000 in a single year, after operating expenses, while convincing writers to contribute for free or almost free, more power to them.
Several years ago, a comedian told the story of a defective calendar that didn’t list Thursdays. And a defective telephone that lacked a key for the number 7.
The OCB strikes me as of the same ilk. Sure, the other six days of the week are listed, but that one day is still missing (or inaccurately described).
I wouldn’t buy a calendar with only six days or a telephone without a 7 key and, for the same reason, I won’t buy the OCB or recommending it to anyone interested in learning more about beer.
Jeff – If you have access to the New Yorker archives read John McPhee’s “Checkpoints,” which provides proof to how amazing the magazine’s fact checkers are (or were when it was written). One reason authors want to get their work in the magazine is so that it will be scrutinized in a way that will make it more attractive to book publishers who would do not review things in the same detail. “Checkpoints” is also in McPhee’s “Silk Parachute” anthology.
I think one of the problems with the entries that have been found to have the most errors was a reliance on secondary sources and were written in some cases by beer writers or brewery employees with no particular expertise in the specific topic. Most such entries’ sources give the exact origin of the errors and there was no attempt to verify the old, incorrect information- they simply repeated it.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but for just one example, how much research or knowledge did UK beer writer Pete Brown have on the subject of US Prohibition before the OCB? It seems to me that he just distilled the information in sources listed down to the required length – a “Cliff Notes” version.
As a result, there is very little actual “Beer/Brewing Industry” info in the entry, little mention of the huge malt syrup industry from most of the large and regional brewers that supplied homebrewers and the widespread and open homebrewing supplies industry or the hundreds of near-beer breweries that survived – barely- the era. No mention of the several legal battles waged by the United States Brewers Association and it’s president, Christian Feigenspan, during the early years of Prohibition – over beer by prescription, the definition and ABV limit of “non-intoxicating”, etc.
Instead, the entry is the same old tired “politics, social mores & gangsters” synopsis- with little “Beer” emphasis. The history of beer and brewing – both commercial and “home” – during the US Prohibition era has yet to be written.
Another review from a respected source making similar points about the book: it’s great and everything, but would be better if it didn’t have so many mistakes.
At some point, do you think Oxford (and the editor and contributors) might ‘fess up to having done a less than thorough job? Or will they stick with the “all books have errors, stop being such a nerd” line?
Bailey – I hesitate to quote this because it has been removed from the Morning Advertiser site and the cache that Alan captured is also going. But in his MA review Roger Protz wrote something along the lines that the Wine Companion had a thousand errors (or maybe thousands) in its first edition.
That seems high, and the book had the advantage of being published before most bloggers had found the Internet. But saying, “Look at all the mistakes there” doesn’t justify them elsewhere.
Evan, thanks for those data–it’s important context. That they’re making gobs of money doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t fired editorial staff, but it’s less persuasive in light of the numbers.
Stan, yes, I recall that piece. (You and I regularly plunder the New Yorker for blog fodder.) The New Yorker remains the gold standard–it’s their brand, after all–but I think magazines are doing a better job keeping standards up than book publishers. In most cases, my freelance work for mags provokes a round of fact-checking. Maybe not New Yorker-level scrutiny, but still.
No prob, Jeff. My point is that the editorial cuts and the $190,000,000 in annual profit — what an obscene amount of money! — and the errors in the book are all one and the same. You don’t get one without the other without the other.