Archive for the 'Beer & Wine' Category

Mindless drinking: The label can fool you

Friday, August 10th, 2007

The authors of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think also have a little bit to say about mindless drinking - in this case wine. And it seems like the results of one study could be relevant to beer.
The recent story:
Forty-one diners at the Spice Box restaurant in Urbana, Illinois were given a […]

Beer by the numbers: Bad idea

Friday, July 20th, 2007

Cheers to Don Russell, who this week asks why we need a score to choose a beer. The headline: 100-point scale for beer ratings a rank idea.
Specifically, he writes about Pislner Urquell hanging an advertisement on its bottle necks declaring it the world’s “highest-rated pilsner.” That according to the Beverage Tasting Institute, the same guys […]

Hey, I found more flavor wheels

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

Can’t help myself, it seems.
I’m not sure I understand Zarfhome, or who Zarf might be, but he or she has done the heavy lifting with a rather complete list of Flavor Wheels of the World.
You’ve got stuff from perfume people, beer, wine, coffee, chocolate, maple products and some other lists.
A cheese flavor wheel is mentioned […]

You don’t want to be a supertaster

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

What did I learn from Mike Steinberger’s three-part series at Slate about sensory perception and tasting wine?
Probably more if I had I wanted to dive into the science. Give him credit was not being afraid to get geeky. This was a serious investigation into tasting physiology, but in a tongue-in-cheek (yes, tongue) way that meant […]

Aromas, culture and sorting out what we taste

Friday, June 15th, 2007

Class will be in session next week when Mike Steinberger launches a three-part series on sensory perception and wine at Slate, the online magazine.
Steinberger warms up with a discussion of why wine writers use the descriptions they do.
What does this have to do with beer? The wine flavor wheel and the beer flavor wheel (click […]

How do you overlook 100 million cases of beer?

Friday, June 1st, 2007

Here’s a multiple choice question:
a) Beer is an industrial product.
b) Beer is an artisanal product.
c) Wine is a pastoral/agricultural product.
d) Wine is an industrial product.
Which if these choices do you think Field Maloney chose in a story that appeared the web magazine Slate? I’ll give you a hint. The headline read: Beer in the Headlights. […]

Is there a winery on the way to the brewery?

Friday, May 25th, 2007

Don’t forget, next Friday is Session #4 and it’s all about drinking local (or regional, or as local/regional as you can be). (How The Session started.)
This will be easier for some than others, but the Brewers Association happily points out the average American lives within 10 miles of a brewery. You probably have seen the […]

Food & Wine gets it (right)

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

This is beer and food done right, mostly for the food and wine crowd.
Maybe precisely for that crowd since it is in the June issue of Food & Wine magazine (the grilling issue).
In “The Keg vs. the Cork in Sonoma” chef San Yoon of the Father’s Office in Santa Monica, one of Southern California’s first […]

Red Stripe and the next generation

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

As I’ve written before, one of the categories here is Beer and Wine, not Beer versus Wine. When we have people over for dinner there will be men drinking wine and women drinking beer (and vice versa), and there might be a little conversation about one or the other but not why one is better […]

The beer and wine discussion done wrong

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

This morning I received an e-mail newsletter from Natalie MacLean, a wine writer whose work I like enough that I subscribed to the newsletter (and have a link to her site under wine sites to read).
This time I got a silly diatribe about beer and wine that invited comment. It read like one of those […]