* The obligatory ST. PATRICK’S DAY IS COMING! ST. PATRICK’S DAY IS COMING! story from The Street delves into the wonders of nitrogen dispense. I’m linking to the third page of the story because of a gem of a concluding quote from Fergal Murray of Guinness: “It’s the greatest beer innovation of all time. It transformed the brand Guinness and made us the lighthouse beer that you have to craft behind the bar.” As I remarked on Twitter when I saw this Saturday morning, glad that’s settled.

* Speaking of innovation. The Chicago Tribune profiles the Goose Island barrel program and John Laffler, who runs it. It’s fair to ask how innovative each of the 285 “innovation projects” really is, given that 285 is a big number. But he says most will never see the light of day. That’s they way it’s supposed to work. Brewers experiment. They dump the failures. Rather than, say, declaring them special and charging a premium. Two gems from Laffler, who previously worked as a psychologist with at-risk youths for 6 1/2 years:

“This is my area. I share it with the barrels. I get really persnickety about people touching (them).”

“I really reject the notion that beer is meant to be collected.”

* Speaking of collecting. If you missed the story about the millionaire fleecing other millionaires out of millions of dollar by selling counterfeit wine the best place to find the latest details is from Mike Steinberger. Money just plain spends different in wine that beer.

Today in Decanter, Andrew Jefford begins what appears will be a two-part investigation into the financial implications of Robert Parker re-scoring the 2009 Bordeaux vintage and declaring it is even better than the 1982.

“I’ve been talking to those who understand the figures more comprehensively than I do, and considered opinion is that Robert Parker’s re-scoring of the 2009 Bordeaux vintage will have added at least £100 million to its ‘value.’ In the two trading days which followed the release of the scores, both Berry Bros and Farr Vintners sold around £3 million’s worth of top 2009 Bordeaux. Some claim that Robert Parker’s influence is waning. They are the wine world’s equivalent of creationists: folk prepared to ignore all evidence because they wish it so.”

Have I showed you this photo before? It was taken in a church in Poperinge, Belgium. You don’t see hop pickers immortalized in stained glass all that often.

As the marketing mavens of Starbucks have discovered, the American palate is seeking an alternative to heavy flavors. Are we becoming—dare I say it?–more nuanced? By golly, I think we are.

For whatever reason, this reminded me of something Italian winemaker Antonio Terni said in The Accidental Connoisseur: “I will only say that Americans like too much in the glass. There’s always too much going on. Other than that, if we’re living on Planet America, that’s not necessarily the fault of Americans.”

If you check out the comments after Kramer’s post you’ll see not everybody agrees with him and this seems to piss off the ones who do. (And you thought pettiness was confined to beer blogs.) I’m enough of a fan of Kramer’s writing and way of looking at things to own a couple of his books, but I ended agreeing with some of those commenting. He seems to be saying that outsized is obvious, lighter is nuanced. The implications are, well, obvious to even those of us who are simple.

I’m guessing that Kramer wouldn’t find nuance in a glass of Bell’s Hopslam. In which case I’d refer him to Malcolm Gladwell. Drink 1,000 glasses and get back to me.

He draws the line at $10, which is a good thing I believe since this allows him room to include a lot of pretty good wines in his lists and not just focus on extreme values. Ironically, however, a $10 wine is classified as “premium” and sometimes “super-premium” here in America. The majority of American wine drinkers think of a $10 wine as a splurge.

I have friends who are afraid to try a $10 wine because they fear that they will be able to taste the difference and be forced to turn their backs on the $6 wines they’ve been enjoying for years.

How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm?

A lot. Heck, The Oxford Companion to the Brontës is 640 pages. There’s The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television and The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (1272 pages, but “the only book on the Supreme Court that a layman should ever need.”)

Most of the books that are part of the franchise must have been more popular when they were new, because it appears these days that beyond the top two on the list none of them outperforms the 100th best selling beer entry (Clone Brews, at this moment) on Amazon.

Those top two, of course, are the shiny, new The Oxford Companion to Beer and the third edition to The Companion to Wine, still selling briskly five years after it was published. I think we all expect the Beer Companion will have the same sort of legs, but that’s a topic for another day.

I own the wine book and recall the excitement within the wine blogosphere when it was released in 2006 (plus that Costco stocked a bunch as a price that beat Amazon). I occasionally hoist it off the shelf — either when I have a particular question or feel in need of exercise, given that it weighs half again as much as the hefty beer book — and I never think to question what I find. I certainly don’t remember it being scrutinized the same way as the Beer Companion.¹

So I asked a few wine bloggers if I missed something. Mike Veseth, author of Wine Wars, wrote back:

I cannot remember any sharp criticisms when the Oxford Companion to Wine appeared. Certainly the release of the current edition was celebrated, not criticized. I suspect that this is because the OCW project is well established and has set the standard for comprehensive wine books.

I asked Jancis Robinson (editor of OCW) what she thought and she replied that, while there were no harsh critiques when the OCW was first released in 1994, she thinks there would be some today just because the times are different — more bloggers and social media forums where opinions are shared.

Yep, the Netscape browser was brand new in 1994 and Amazon didn’t exist. Nor did Rate Beer or Beer Advocate or any of the blogs on the right. But I’m still trying to figure out if that explains the all that has already been written about the Beer Companion.

Are the errors that grievous? Is it that those who really care about beer (and the facts related to beer) care than much more? Is beer (and beer history) that complicated, subjective to interpretation, lost in the ether?

As I was typing this post Alan McLeod added Garrett Oliver’s comments to OCBeerCommentary, and then Simon Johnson’s thoughtful conclusions popped up in my feed reader. (Yes, two Simon Johnson links inside of a week; no more, I promise.)

Go read them, because so far I’m long questions and short answers.

¹ OCBeerCommentary provides both links to what has been written about the Beer Companion (see “general comments”) and comments that generally identify errata.

But right now you could make an argument for Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver — given the attention being lavished on The Oxford Companion to Beer, the four-pound beer book that is a top seller at Amazon.

This is a monster with more than 1,100 entries and it fell to Oliver to decide what got on the beer ark and what didn’t.

“Oud bruin, come aboard. Gose, sorry too obscure.”

“Serebrianka, we wouldn’t turn away one of Cascade’s hop ancestors. Centennial? That’s a lovely letter of recommendation from Ralph Olson, but we only have room for 70 hop varieties.”

That’s influence.

However, Oliver nominated a different candidate for most influential last week at the Great American Beer Festival: Eric Asmimov of the New York Times, who writes regularly about wine and very occasionally beer. Oliver offered that opinion toward the end of a half hour discussion in the Brewers Studio Pavilion about “The Evolution of Beer Scholarship.” He was making a point about how differently publications of all sorts treat beer and wine.

Few newspapers feature regular coverage of beer (although there are many wine columnists). So while Asimov may write seldom about beer, he does so to a very large audience. There’s no denying his reach when he does delve into beer but he doesn’t speak with the same influential voice he uses when discussing wine. And he doesn’t do it often enough to wield the influence he obviously could.

Just to be clear, he could because he is a terrific and sensible writer. In fact, give his story about the Companion a read and stick around for the brilliant conclusion.

As beer programs like Eleven Madison’s and volumes like the “Oxford Companion” are partly an effort to portray beer in all its multifaceted glories, some fear that a consequence will be a rise in the same sort of anxieties and pretentiousness that plague and intimidate wine consumers.

I think this fear is overstated. Beer consumers are a far more confident lot than wine consumers. They’re at ease with beer, mostly because they’ve had a solid grounding in their subject, unlike wine consumers who’ve been brainwashed into believing they must be educated or taught how to “appreciate” wine before they can enjoy it. The “Oxford Companion” is simply a wonderful resource for what, even when it’s complex, unusual, unfamiliar or strikingly different, is still just beer, regardless of how it is dressed up.

Still just beer.

That echoes nicely about the room.

¹ In such conversations the word living is implied, because we expect commentary on current events, comparisons of things new. Realistically, four years after his death, Michael Jackson remains the most influential.

And, as in 2005, wine gains. So now 36% of drinkers prefer beer (that will be down to 1% in seven years if beer continues to lose 5% per year) and 35% favor wine. Lots of numbers that people who sell wine must love (look at the preferences of college graduates). Then, of course, there is the last paragraph.

While meaningful, this year’s shifts are not much different in magnitude from those seen in 2005 – changes that proved temporary. Whether beer continues to lose ground to other forms of liquor or rebounds may depend on the future direction of young adults’ drink preferences.

Maybe this will turn out to be a big deal and maybe it won’t. Certainly anybody running a brewery, particularly one with shrinking sales, should be bothered if it turns out that younger drinkers are abandoning beer for wine.

But what Gallup apparently missed when it formulated the questions — at least the ones we’re seeing the answers for — is that there’s beer and there’s beer.

(Of course it should be well written and focus on a topic that interests me. I sense I’ve read as much about Lady Gaga as I ever will, although I’m sure there’s plenty more that will amuse somebody else.)

I was reminded of this well into Mike Veseth’s Wine Wars when he wrote:

“Well, in wine tasting you learn that sometimes it can be helpful to tilt your glass at an angle and look at the edge of the wine. Sometimes this ‘sideways’ view provides information about the past and clues to the future. It’s time to take a sideways look at the future of wine.”

I was that far into the book (page 195) because Veseth takes a sideways look when discussing “The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists” (the sub-title of the book and the three sections in which is it divided). The first two parts help understand what’s different about shopping for wine at Trader Joe’s and Costco, and that was enough to keep my attention. Veseth is an economist and that’s one of the reasons I subscribe to his blog feed.

(And maybe the history of Blue Nun is special because way back when a friend who knew much more about wine than I did at the time actually sent back a bottle of Blue Nun. Who the hell knows when a bottle of Blue Nun is “off”?)

I wish there were more books like this focused on beer. If you look at Amazon’s list of best selling beer books the “how to” theme is pretty apparent. (The same is true of wine, but those aren’t the books I read.)

That’s why I plan to break away from drinking beer long enough at the Great American Beer Festival to listen to the discussion of “The Evolution of Beer Scholarship” in the Brewers Studio Pavilion (scroll down).

The writing and editorial team of the newly published The Oxford Companion to Beer, will discuss the developing resources in beer education. Compared to a well-defined wine academia, beer education has always been pretty thin, but that’s changing fast. Discussing resources from oral tradition to iPhone apps, Editor-in-Chief, Garrett Oliver, will lead this conversation on the current demand for genuine information and scholarship on beer, and what’s been happening to meet that demand and make brewing studies deeper and more interesting than ever before.

If I don’t make it and you do please tell them you’re pretty sure there is a demand for more information about hops.

Me either. However, I can envision The Oxford Companion to Beer on top of a bar, it’s otherwise elegant cover a bit beer stained.

Amazon reports the book will be available Oct. 7, but editor Garrett Oliver will be signing copies the week before at the Great American Beer Festival.

Pre-publication promotion states “this book is the perfect shelf-mate to Oxford’s renowned Companion to Wine and an absolutely indispensable volume for everyone who loves beer as well as all beverage professionals, including home brewers, restaurateurs, journalists, cooking school instructors, beer importers, distributors, and retailers, and a host of others.” More details are at
Amazon.

I have not seen the list of more than 1,100 entries, but the preview includes topics such as Acetyl CoA and Breweriana; pretty diverse before we even leave the Bs.

Last May, I suggested that every blogger should own Brewery History, No. 139 because it is full of thought-provoking topics. It might take a while to digest Companion to Beer when it arrives — the 960 pages weigh in at four pounds — but it obviously will be packed with a heck of a lot more conversation starters . . . and let’s hope the definitive information to end the conversations that get a bit tedious.

¹ I just flipped open a page and pointed my finger. Funny that we’d expect to see turpenes covered in this book as well.

This is a “map cartouche of one of the Western Hemisphere’s earliest recorded recipes (for a form of beer).” It was taken from from America, a map by Jodocus Hondius (Amsterdam, 1606). Seems like a poster that would sell well in homebrew shops.

You’ll find it here, along with dozens of other images from the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and more about the growing American culinary history collection at the library.

* Trading up to beer (and then to wine). A working paper from the American Association of Wine Economists exams the evolution of beer consumption between countries and over time. Parts are easier to understand if you have an Economics to English dictionary at your side.

Although the focus is on economics, the authors look at all the factors that determine what makes a “beer drinking nation.” In doing so, they track how consumption in those nations has changed dramatically in the past 50 years and ask why. Their findings, in economic speak:

Our first important result is that we do indeed find an inverted-U shaped relation between income and per capita beer consumption in all pooled OLS ánd fixed effects specifications. From the pooled OLS regressions (Table 3), we find that countries with higher levels of income initially consume more beer. Yet, the second order coefficient on income is negative, indicating that from a certain income level onwards, higher incomes lead to lower per capita beer consumption. The first and second order effects for income are strongly significant and the coefficients are quite robust across the different specifications.

The fixed effects regression results confirm this (Table 4), so the non-linear relationship for income holds not only between countries, but also within individual countries over time. As a country becomes richer, beer consumption rises, but when incomes continue to grow, beer consumption starts to decline at some income level. We calculated the turning point, i.e. the point where beer consumption starts declining with growing incomes, to be approximately 22,000 US dollars per capita.

So you get a graph that looks like this, with beer sales soaring in emerging economies — quite obviously China, but also Russia, Brazil and India.

What the wine economists want to know is “what’s next?” As consumers grow richer will they spend more money on wine (and less on beer)? The Chinese effect has already boosted prices of high-end French wines. Most predict something similar with wines across all prices categories, although that might be 20 years off.

What the study doesn’t consider at all is “beer different,” as in not a commodity, the beers drinkers are “trading up” to on a regular basis, in just about any country where they can find them.

* ‘Extreme’ boiling. Port Brewing/Lost Abbey has begun a “behind the scenes” video series, the first featuring how it makes Hot Rocks Lager. This is an Old World beer, certainly not “extreme.” But the process is a little out of the ordinary, and might just be what it looks like to make beer in Hell. Tomme Arthur calls it a “super boil,” and it is. Pay close attention beginning about 1:40 into the video.