musing

Here’s the beer list at Cafe De II Prinsen in Amsterdam.

Is there a beer here that doesn’t fit?

No, this isn’t where you buy beer at Legoland in Germany, located a bit east of Ulm.

The photo shows one of thousands of buildings in Miniland, this particular one dwarfed by the likes of a replica of the Allianz arena in Munich (the soccer venue). The beer serving size at the Bier Stube would be one very small lego block.

However, as you would expect in Germany, adults can drink beer in the park. A .5L of Autrenrieder hefeweizen, helles or radler costs 3.20 euros.

I stand corrected. You can buy a liter of all-grain, full-flavored beer for less than you’d pay for a liter of gas.

Here’s proof, a photo taken at a small grocery store in Wertheim, Germany (at the junction of the Main and Tauber rivers, and with terrific castle ruins).

Beer is .66 euro (or less) for .5L. That’s 1.32 euro if you bought two (in other words a liter). The cheapest we’ve seen gas for is 1.39 for a liter of diesel (the cheapest gas in Germany, as opposed to the silly flip-flop in the U.S. where diesel costs more).

I’m really not sure why I feel a need to pass along these links, because this practice won’t continue past Monday, when we begin 15 weeks of zig zagging around Europe. But here goes:

– Before you hit the link on this one, a little quiz. I’ll give you the tasting lineups at a couple of spots and you guess where the tastings are being held (same city):

1. [blank] will be tasting not only draught Koenig Ludwig, La Chouffe, and Racer 5 but they will also be sampling Paulaner Oktoberfest as well.

2. He’ll be sampling these beers: Dieu de Ciel Peche Mortel, Mikkeller Black Hole, Nogne #100, Avery The Beast and a few Oktoberfests like Avery Kaiser Oktoberfest.

The answer would be St. Louis. These are some fine beers and I’m glad that beer lovers in St. Louis get a shot at them. But shouldn’t there be at least one beer in there that comes from some place inside of 800 miles away?

Speaking of beer a long way from home: I’m not surprised when I see Bear Republic beers here in New Jersey. They are hefty enough to make a long journey. But I did a double take when I spotted Ballast Point Yellow Tail. This is a beer in the spirit of a kölsch, a little fragile for a coast-to-coast trip.

Looking at the beer selection can be a little strange here at mid-state. You can find Flying Fish, but it certainly isn’t everywhere. Climax counter-pressure filled growlers have an OK presence, which makes me grin. And tracking down the Ramstein wheat beers from High Point is a challenge. Weiss beers have a particular homecourt advantage, and High Point’s are good ones, but based on what I see on shelves everybody prefers German weiss beers.

Also from St. Louis. The Post-Dispatch comes up with ice cream and beer mixes. Not every one works: see Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat and rainbow sherbet. Here’s one you shouldn’t try if you have a heart condition: Southern Tier Crème Brûlée Imperial Milk Stout and coffee ice cream with chocolate espresso chips.

Underground breweries? The New York Times had a feature this week headlined “The Anti-Restaurants” which is sorta about underground restaurants. Is there something similar in beer? Yep. It’s called homebrewing.

I fear this will not end well. Just in case you missed the Wall Street Journal story about higher hop prices attracting hop growing newcomers, the link. OK, it doesn’t have to end badly everywhere. Rick Pedersen has been working on getting hops going in upstate New York for almost 10 years, so he knows that hop farmers can’t expect $30 a pound prices on a long term basis.

But I can’t help but think back to my youth in Central Illinois, where my father taught Ag Econ. I heard too many stories about dentists who decided to trade soybeans and ended up with a lawn full of beans. Sure, that’s different than being a farmer, but speculating is speculating.

Sorry to be such a curmudgeon on the weekend; must be getting anxious to be back on the road. And I didn’t mean to be horning in on Roger Baylor’s territory.

Earlier this summer Martyn Cornell wrote that the Wikipedia entry on India Pale Ale “so completely, uselessly wrong as to be actively dangerous: the mistakes in it are going to be repeated by other writers too lazy to do their own research, and they are likely to take years to stamp out.” A bit of a discussion about Wikipedia followed with a bit of a sidebar about how dang frustrating it is to see myths get repeated as fact.

We were in the Canadian Rockies at the time, and later it seemed too late to chime that small breweries are also a culprit when it comes to the IPA story. A shorter version of the Wikipedia entry gets shown thousands of times a day to drinkers ordering from brewpub menus or customers reading the blurb on the neck label. In the long run this propagates the information just as dangerously as Wikipedia.

I thought of that this week when we visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia — yes, “America’s Best Beer Drinking City” but this was a home school field trip. The gift shop sells all manner of items quoting Benjamin Franklin, including T-shirts and coasters, proclaiming, “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

The problem is that Franklin probably never said this. Mid-Atlantic Brewing News explained this well nearly three years go (no link to the story – sorry), and Bob Skilnik had more details shortly thereafter.

What do you think the chances are the gift store will withdraw these obviously good sellers from its inventory for the sake of historical accuracy?