“If a beer is stale make sure it is always stale.”
That’s what Charlie Bamforth — a “beer professor” with too many credentials to list and author of the new Beer Is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing — told brewers yesterday during a conference call/online presentation for members of the Brewers Association.
Obviously, Bamforth was not advocating brewers sell stale beer — the seminar was titled, “Keep it Fresh: Understanding How Time, Temperature and Oxygen Impact Your Beer and What to Do About Them” — but he did give us something to think about.
His point was much like the lesson a German brewmaster taught Greg Zaccardi, founder of New Jersey’s High Point Brewing, in the mid-1990s.
“He said your beer can always be excellent or always be bad. It can’t go from excellent to bad to excellent,” Zaccardi remembers. “People will buy bad beer. They’ll get used to it.”
Stan, do you know if the book posits or refutes the Benjamin Franklin quote?
This http://twitpic.com/ke4si is the only well documented Ben Franklin quote about liquid refreshment that I am aware of.
Just started the book. There is an “About the Title” page at the outset.
“It is now generally believed that, whereas Benjamin Franklin made many great observations, he did not actually says that ,em>beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. It seem that he did write, in a 1779 letter to the French economist Andre Morelle: ‘Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there is enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and wants to see us happy.’ I am sure he had beer in his heart of hearts, though.”
How does this fit in with NEW BEER RULE #4: The god of beer is not consistency?
Hmmm… If he would have used my source he could have shortened that to a hearty, “OH YEA!”
Charles: I guess beer can be inconsistent and still excellent.
Consistency is overrated. But not by much.
I remember recalling Dr. Bamforth tell of the time he worked for Bass and they went about cleaning up diacetyl in a beer of theirs only to find the public cry foul. The moral I got from that anecdote being, “flaws” in a beer are okay so long as they’re deliberate and the results taste good.
If you’re running a successful business, keep brewing what makes people happy.
Is Lagunitas IPA an IPA by Lagunitas’ 2010 standards? Hardly. Their New Dogtown Pale is hoppier as well as more potent.
When it comes down to it, keep the consumer happy, keep brewing whatever it is that they know you for. If you do that, you’ll stay in business and can brew all the other stuff you want to play around with.