More than 20 years later, Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Ellison described a scene where Busch and Doug Muhleman, then A-B’s vice president for brewing and technology, had cans from 1982, 1988, 1993, 1998 and 2003 thawed and set before them in the corporate tasting room. She wrote, “Muhleman . . . says the company didn’t set out to make the beers less bitter. He calls the change ‘creep,’ the result of endlessly modifying the beer to allow for change in ingredients, weather and consumer taste. ‘Through continues feedback, listening to consumers, this is a change over 20, 30, 40 years,’ says Mr. Muhleman, gesturing toward the row of Budweiser cans. ‘Over time there is a drift.’

“The sample cans demonstrate how ‘creep’ works. The difference in taste between two beers brewed five years apart is indistinguishable. Yet, the difference between the 1982 beer and the 2003 beer is distinct. ‘The bones are the same. The same structure,’ says Mr. Muhleman. Overall, however, ‘the beers have gotten a little less bitter.’”

In Why Beer Matters Evan Rail suggests we consider “beer’s unstuck relationship to time.”

Which is why I find myself thinking about beer’s bones. Why when I drink a crappy bottle of Pilsner Urquell it pains me to think about how good it can still taste in the caves underneath the brewery. Why if I didn’t have a cold that disconnected by olfactory system from my brain yesterday — when temperatures here in St. Louis were flat out balmy — I would have been sitting in front of Urban Chestnut Brewing drinking Zwickel, a beer most definitely unstuck in place as well as time.

Beer Matters is first of about Rail’s own relationship with beer.

I can’t explain what beer means for everyone: as a subject, beer is too broad and deep, too varied and multiform, just like the wide public for whom it has clearly come to mean so much. But I can tell you a few things about beer that I like most myself, why beer has come to matter to me, and what I tell people when they ask why I have chosen to write about it.

An allusion to Billy Pilgrim aside, this relationship is an act of free will. He writes, “If the unexamined life has less merit than one which has borne deep investigation, clearly there is some value in caring about what you eat and drink.”

He gives 937 words to his personal obsession with the Polish smoked-wheat beer known as Grodziskie, and part of the story is about how quickly a single beer can disappear.

Despite its recent fall from grace Budweiser hardly seems in such danger. And I don’t really care what a can from 1982 might taste like. But I do appreciate that August Busch III understood why it matters, why beer matters.

*****

Now the full disclosure. Evan Rail and I have been drinking together. He bought rounds. I bought rounds. He emailed me a copy of Why Beer Matters for review. In fact, I bought it from Amazon, in part because we are sort of friends and in part because of curiosity about how the whole “download it to Kindle” would work even though our family does not yet don’t own a Kindle. (We go to the library a lot, plus I read it on my phone.)

The essay runs about 6,500 words, a chapter in some books. You’d like to read it in a beer publication, but find me one that will print something of such length. I have no idea what Beer Matters might lead to from Evan — notice he was “Rail” in the review part, very professional, but this is the personal part — or others. But I hope it’s more.

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.

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.

No summarizing from me. You must go read it. (Then go buy Amber, Gold & Black: The History of Britain’s Great Beers. Support proper research. Beer: The Story of the Pint also belongs in your library, but it’s out of print, so buy something he earns royalty for.)

But I do have to mention the sentence in his post where I stopped, shook my head, laughed, rolled back my chair and slapped my knee. Honest.

Even Wikipedia is getting that right now.

Words you don’t want on your tombstone.

(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.

- Max Bahnson

There is much more to Prague than beer, but for a beer oriented visitor there never seems to be enough time to discover all the pivo the city has to offer.

Sure, start with a pilsner, because when you order a pilsner in Prague it will be Pilsner Urquell. That’s the law. And many, probably most, tourists leave town happy to have enjoyed what beer experiences luck gives them.

Then there are the rest of us. We want to know about Výcepní Pivo and Ležák — “Hey, these aren’t listed in the Official Beer Geek Style Guidelines (ABGSG)” — and the yeasty difference between Nefiltrované and Kvasnicové. We want to know the best places to drink in situ; the best revivalists beers featuring pilsner malt and Saaz hops as well as cutting edge beers (stouts and IPAs in Prague, indeed).

We need books like Evan Rail’s Good Beer Guide Prague & the Czech Republic and Prague: A Pisshead’s Pub Guide by Max Bahnson. I’ve previously recommended Evan’s book, and in suggesting that Prague is a two beer guidebook city must include a small disclaimer related to the Pisshead Guide.

When he was writing the book, Max sent me some sample pages. I enthusiastically endorsed the content and the style. It would be a dirty trick for me to turn around and criticize it now. But honestly, I can think of only one thing I’d change. It would be cool if the hand-drawn maps were on napkins or coasters you could rip from the book.

I expect a guide book to be easy to read, long useful information and amusing. Because this book is organized by pub crawls it can take an extra few minutes to find a single destination, and an index would help. But how much you enjoy the Pisshead Guide really depends on if you enjoy the writing. I do, and originally pulled out some quotes from the book to illustrate. Then I realized it is better to suggest you visit his blog and read at least until you’ve come across a paragraph or three that you figure would piss off somebody. Then you’ll have a better idea if this book is for you.

You can buy it here.

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.

Last Saturday after I parked the car and before Sierra and I went foraging at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market we came across the car pictured above. The bumper stickers represent Boulevard Brewing, Farm Aid and KDHX, an independent radio station that play Chris Knight as often as he pops up on my Chris Knight Pandora station. (Yes, there is another, but it is faded beyond my recognition.)

I told Sierra, “I think we’re in the right spot.”

Moving to a new city is different that visiting a new city every few days, as we did in 2008 and 2009. Then when we needed propane, for instance, we didn’t do much comparing and contrasting. We found a spot, we filled up, we headed down the road. Now I want a handy place to refill my tank (for grilling and brewing), one that charges a fair price (found it, thank you).

The beer part is pretty easy. I was following STLHops and Evan Benn’s Hip Hops column even before we knew we’d be moving back to the Midwest. Between the reconnaissance Daria did, the dining and drinking stops we made when Sierra and I visited and the St. Louis Brewers Heritage Festival (the week after we arrived) we’re feeling almost “caught up.”

Almost, because my St. Louis list on Twitter includes daily announcements of beers hitting town, new local releases, special events. And, like everybody else, we’re braced for the next wave.

Ultimately, though, my goal isn’t to find the best farmer’s market or Italian restaurant on The Hill or food truck any more than I worry any more about the “perfect pint.” I’m in the right place if I’m in a good place for me. And, just as when I was a sportswriter and somehow always ended up at the high school gym without asking directions, finding good places for beer is one of my few natural talents.

Two books that recently landed on my desk — “Brew in the Lou” St. Louis’ Beer Culture, Past, Present, Future and Brewed Awakening: Behind the Beers and Brewers Leading the World’s Craft Brewing Revolution — were not written with me in mind, but for those still navigating the noise generated by so much new in beer. To help drinkers find the right place, or perhaps be reassured they actually have.

Brewed Awakening isn’t due until November, so I’ll write about it later. Brew in the Lou is about where we live now. But why, other than the amazing picture of Stephen Hale on Page 32, is it worth my time? I’d want this book for my library if we still lived in New Mexico because Evan Benn looks at beer and beer “in the Lou” through a new set of eyes. This is interesting to those reading from afar but even more useful for those intrigued or overwhelmed, or perhaps landing somewhere between, by the new.

A couple a national publications recently carried stories about the outbreak of new breweries in and near the city, new specialty beer focused bars, and growing attention to beer in “better” restaurants. They suggest a cause and effect between InBev taking over Anheuser-Busch (i.e. A-B is no longer “locally owned”) and more interest in beer that isn’t called Bud. Perhaps, but I’m pretty sure what’s now obvious was already underway. Either way, Benn began working for the Post-Dispatch in 2009, after the sale, and wasn’t yet much of a “beer guy.”

Thus the fresh eyes. He’s a journalist — he decided he wanted to work for newspapers when he was in middle school; I didn’t know such people still existed, bless his heart — and he found a story that tracks from the mid-nineteenth century to probably somewhere in the middle of this one and makes sense. In the introduction he writes, “My goal: To tell the tale of beer’s past, present and future in the Gateway City, with an eye toward how we got to where we are today, and where we’re going tomorrow.” Last weekend 55 people showed up for a sold out brewpub tour he guided through St. Louis. That’s a pretty good crowd, so somebody’s listening.

Physically, the book reminds me of the guides from Cogan & Mater (Tim Webb’s brainchild), for instance Around Brussels in 80 Beers. It’s full of lush photos that look particularly nice printed on heavy, glossy stock. Unlike the C&G books or the Stackpole state breweries guides that began with Lew Bryson’s Pennsylvania Breweries this does not appear to be the beginning of a franchise. It’s a local production. But it sure seems like something similar in Chicago or Austin or Denver would help locals or tourists find just the right place.

Although the combination might seem curious, “Brewing Up a Business: Adventures in Beer from the Founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery” (Revised and Updated) and “Beer Is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing” make a pretty educational one-two punch for an aspiring brewery owner.

The former comes from Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head founder-owner, and has earned plenty of praise from those who work outside a world populated by brewing kettles and cases of beer. Bob Guccione Jr. from Spin magazine, Jim Davis of New Balance and a former governor of Delaware are among those offering back cover blurbs.

It wouldn’t be one of Amazon’s best sellers in a category like Books > Business & Investing > Small Business & Entrepreneurship > Hospitality Businesses were the target audience only those selling beer. But it is rich with examples related directly to making and selling beer and written in a conversational tone. Calagione includes enough off-centered stories to make the book popular with fans of the brewery, and its founder, people with no interest in starting their own brewery.

Calagione wrote the first edition in 2005, so this update was in order. Not so much to reflect that Dogfish brews much more beer these days, but provide more about marketing, and particularly social media.

The book is long nuts and bolts. He goes into detail, for instance, about plans to sell $51 million worth of beer in 2011, running through the roster of just how many salespeople are involved and compensation packages.

It makes an interesting contrast to “Beer Is Proof God Loves Us,” which offers philosophy from Charlie Bamforth, “the beer professor” better known for well, professorial, books. Like “Standards of Brewing: a Practical Approach to Consistency and Excellence.”

A native of England, Bamforth has worked for large breweries, in brewing research and was selected the first Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Malting and Brewing Sciences at UC Davis. Bamforth makes his way toward “God in a Glass” (the 10th chapter) with stories that should appeal to the most ardent “craft beer” fan. He keeps things moving by employing end notes, which in total make up about half the book and are full of both short clarifications and long colorful stories.

But he doesn’t pander. For instance, he explains why a newly educated brewer might be much happier working for a very large brewery . . . while expressing concern about the number of jobs that actually may be available as those big breweries grow ever more efficient. He devotes a chapter to “So What is Quality” and does not deduct points when technically proficient beers strive to “reach the common denominator.”

He would be on the same side of the table as Calagione at one of those beer versus wine dinners. (In fact, I previously reviewed Bamforth’s “Grape vs. Grain’ and Calagione’s “He Said Beer, She Said Wine” in the same post.)

In the introduction (which itself merits 13 end notes), Bamforth writes, “The world of beer is hugely different from that I first glimpsed as a too young drinker close to the dark satanic mills of my native Northern England. has beer, I wonder, lost its soul?

“Or is it, rather, me that is the dinosaur? Is the enormous consolidation that has been the hallmark of the world’s brewing industry for decades nothing more than business evolution writ large as survival of the fittest? Do the beers that folks enjoy today . . . speak to a new age of Kindle, Facebook, and fast food?

“In truth, there remains much of his hoary old traditionalist to delight in: the burgeoning craft beer sector in his new motherland, the United States. A growing global realization that beer, rather than wine, is the ideal accompaniment to foods of all types and (whisper it) is actually good for you, in moderation.

“All is not lost in the world of beer.”

“We’re trying to add 10 customers at a time. The big brewers are trying to add a million,” he said. “We’re in different businesses. We both make something called beer, but they don’t really taste much alike. The big brewers are of a completely different mindset. A-B has more in common with Coca-Cola than they do with us. That’s not to say their beer is bad. It’s just different from what we make.”

Wagner worked as an investment banker before founding Saint Arnold. The skills he learned no doubt serve his business well, but any story about his brewery starts with beer. In contrast, beer is not at the center of Dethroning the King: The Hostile Takeover of Anheuser-Busch, an American Icon. The book details the takeover of one brewing giant (A-B) by another brewing giant (InBev). Lots of hostile fire, some flirtations, plenty of intrigue, all of it happening at a stunningly fast pace.

Beer itself is barely at the periphery through much of the book. It’s most prominent when author Julie MacIntosh turns her attention to the Busch family, notably the uneasy relationship between August III and August IV. Almost every review of this book has pointed out with some surprise that the family controlled so little A-B stock by 2008. Few add that although the Busch family did not have it in their power to block the takeover it came together during a rocky economic time in 2008 and could easily have fallen apart. Had August III not pushed for the deal, and her sources certainly indicate he did so with a capital P, the financing window could have closed before InBev had everything in place.

Again, Dethroning the King is about the deal. How it happened, and pretty much why it happened. It’s not about the relationship between the city of St. Louis, its corporate and spiritual home, and the company. Recently, stories in The Washington Post and Bloomberg have examined how the takeover opened the door for smaller brewers in St. Louis. MacIntosh barely touches on such matters.

Not to make fun of her, but an example from the early pages indicates how little of St. Louis — more time spent in boardrooms than barrooms, plus the various locations (notably an airport hangar) where meetings were held — she got to know. Writing about the “Wassup?” advertising campaign she describes August IV giving the spots a final test run on “a well-known hill in St. Louis where a pack of Italian restaurants was concentrated.” This, of course, is not a hill but The Hill, one of America’s more famous Italian neighborhoods.

OK, it’s not fair to judge a book by what’s not in it. However even though A-B became a global company, and even though it operates a dozen breweries all over the United States we always understood that if Budweiser was the king the throne had to be in St. Louis. What does the change mean there? On the national scale, why all the attention to the fact that a foreign operation officially owns what was already an international company?

Those questions, as well as others of global impact, will be more easily answered after additional time has passed. This book, full of financial details, was ready to be written. It’s likely one historians will consult for years.

For instance, MacIntosh points repeatedly to how the company spent lavishly for travel and various amenities on the corporate side. Such “fat” that could be easily eliminated made A-B vulnerable, because InBev (and previously Ambev) has been famous for rewarding stockholders by ruthlessly improving the bottom line.

Although she doesn’t explain that the company spent just as freely when it came to acquiring the best ingredients that too was part of the Busch philosophy. Since the deal closed the new company has divested itself of many contracts with hop growers from the south of Germany to the American northwest (honorably it should be pointed out). Wouldn’t you think this has implications for A-B InBev beers? As significantly it may affect what hops are generally available, plus their quality, for all brewers. More for history to sort out.

*****

Order Dethroning the King from BeerBooks.com (and support an independent bookstore).