Phil has nicely wrapped up The Session #58: A Christmas Carol at at Beersay and so it is on to #59.

Host Mario Rubio offers a topic that won’t quite fit in a headline: “I Almost Always Drink Beer, But When I Don’t . . .”

So as we are all incredibly interesting people, and almost always drink beer, let’s talk about what we drink when not drinking beer. Maybe your passion for coffee rivals that of craft beer, or it could be another alcoholic beverage such as scotch. My daughter being a root beer fan would appreciate her dad reviewing a few fizzy sodas. Maybe you have a drink that takes the edge off the beer, be it hair of the dog or a palate cleanser during the evening.

Beer cocktails, wines, ciders, meads, you name it as long as it’s not beer. Try to tie it in with craft beer in some way for extra credit. Be creative and I’ll see you guys in the new year.

Got milk?

Or maybe it is Things I never thought I’d see . . .

Anyway, more than 14 years ago our daughter, Sierra, not yet a year old, matched her hand up against a sticker in the brewery at Left Hand Brewing in Longmont, Colorado. For years I told a perhaps-made-up-story about how she learned to tell her left from right by checking Left Hand bottle caps.

So this morning after I dropped her at high school I’m heading home and not far up the road I see a beer truck with a giant Left Hand logo on the back. Not something I ever thought I’d see driving along a street in St. Louis (Clayton in reality, but this way you don’t have to get out a map).

Two tidbits from today’s Shanken News Daily:

* Heineken has announced a global marketing partnership with Facebook to create digital campaigns for the company’s brands around the world. The agreement will help Heineken reach over 800 million Facebook users. Heineken says its Facebook fan page is the largest for any beer brand, with over 4.6 million adult users.

* The U.S. beer market continues to struggle, according to the latest numbers from Nielsen. Off-premise volumes declined 1.9% in the most recent 52-week period (ending November 12) to 1.38 billion cases. The outlook appeared brighter on a value basis, as dollar sales inched up 0.6% to $28.6 billion during the same time period. The average price of beer in the off-premise increased 2.4% to $19.82 a case.

Craft and specialty brews continue to be the most vibrant segment in the beer category, surging 16.6% by volume in the 52-week period, with even stronger value growth (+17.8%) on an average price of $31.80 a case. The craft/microbrew segment is priced higher, on average, than imported brands ($27.59), yet imports fell 0.6% by volume during the same time span. Mexico continues to be the largest-selling origin for imported brews off-premise, at 78.7 million cases (+0.4%), but the fastest-growing source was Belgium (+28.9%).

The headline above is simply an answer to a question asked at Rate Beer that made its way into my Twitter feed.

Confession. The question actually reads “When did craft beer jump the shark?” I think making the conversation simply about [no modifier needed] beer will do.

(It seems that the discussion at Rate Beer, which was three posts old when I first visited, has evolved into something else. Like how people interact with beer. That’s OK, but I’m more interested in the simpler question.)

In 1322, brewers in Dordrecht in the Netherlands made a hopped beer called hoppenbier and an unhopped fermented beverage called ael. Hoppenbier was likely a shocker. Perhaps even more so because Dutch brewers were trying to catch up with those damned imported hopped beers from Hamburg that tasted like nothing the locals had ever had. They may even have overshot their mark since they were still learning about hops. After all, the year before it was against the law for them to use hops in beer.

New things happen. Brewers may put coffee into beer, pumpkins, bog myrtle, acorns, and maybe even ground up shark’s teeth.

But Max will still be able to find a new světlý ležák to praise.

Start with this premise: “It seems that in today’s uncertain and flagging America, one sign of community prosperity and revitalization is a microbrewery or brewpub in town.”

The Ecocentric blog examines in some detail the role of small breweries in towns where they operate. The history gets a little iffy now and then, but ultimately Kai Olson-Sawyer makes a point that “just like with food, conscientious consumers are willing to pay a little more for better quality and for the local connection.”

The leap of faith here is that local equals better quality. It’s one thing for a brewer to say, “I can order the best quality malt in the world, the best hops, source yeast that provides whatever flavor you want and replicate water from any brewing region of the world.” Another to say, “Fresh hops from the farmer up the road are just as good as from the Czech Republic or the Yakima Valley.”

To my way of thinking the first beer qualifies as local. But not everybody would agree.

This is tricky territory. I loved my grandfather’s farm. I’m all for the idea of urban farming, for finding fresh produce (in season) within the city limits. I wish all the luck in the world to those farmers from Vermont to Southern California who are giving hops a whirl. I’ve had beers I’d buy again that were dry hopped with stuff from homebrewers yards (and donated to a brewery). But I know full well how hard it is to properly grow, pick and process quality hops. Which means most of the breweries around the world are going to buy most of their hops from some place not so close.

In all fairness, the point at Ecocentric blog was not to make localness exclusive, but there are those who would. And that’s not any better for local beer than trying to come up with arbitrary definitions for “craft” beer.

More stuff to read:

- Boak and Bailey offer The six degrees of beer appreciation. “There’s a fine line between enthusing about better beer and being a snob.”

- 1 Wine Dude (Joe Roberts) calls “this the single most important piece of wine news in years” and the implications for beer should be obvious. Australian Wine Research Institute researchers have sequenced the Brettanomyces genome.

- The New York Cork Report gives us “Your Ultimate Guide to Pairing Beer and Cheese.” Hard to argue with pairing a fresh Catapano goat cheese and Southampton Cuvee des Fleurs.

This is my contribution to The Session #58, hosted by Phil Hardy at Beersay: A Christmas Carol. Visit his site for more posts.

If you were going to buy Scrooge a beer for the holidays, realizing full well he wouldn’t be getting the next round, which one would you choose?

This is easier to think about when you can put a face to Scrooge, or the face of one of the many actors who have played him on film. Plenty of contrasting choices — for instance George C. Scott (Patton) or Bill Murray (Stripes)? Jim Carrey, Kelsey Grammer, Tim Curry (well, his voice), Reginald Owen, the list goes on.

I’m partial to Alistair Sim from the 1951 film Scrooge (and later in the voice in an animated TV version of A Christmas Carol). Who wouldn’t want to buy a beer for a “sad-faced actor, with the voice of a fastidious ghoul?”

And what beer?

Ebeneezer from BridgePort Brewing in Portland, of course. Pour it in a snifter and put another log on the fire.

Which Scrooge would you pick? And which beer?

Because the topic of beer marketing pops up here from time to time, and because my obviously too subtle effort to provoke comment on Miller’s World Beer Cup commercial fell flat I’ll quietly pass along information about a contest Port Brewing/The Lost Abbey is holding. Basically, they plan to film a commercial, are inviting suggestions, and are giving away a trip for two to San Diego.

Here are the details (exclamation points and all):

“In early 2012 we’ll be filming our first broadcast-ready commercial, and we’re looking to our Faithful Followers to tell us how they’d introduce our brewery and its products to those who’ve yet to be enlightened. To help stimulate everyone’s creativity we’re holding a competition all December long for the best commercial concept! Judged by our in-house Conclave, three winners will receive Port Brewing and The Lost Abbey merchandise and wearbles. And our Grand Prize winner will becoming to San Diego!”

Chances are that even though San Diego hosts the World Beer Cup in 2012 the crew at Port/Lost Abbey isn’t looking for something like this:

The goal is to identify the outlier and explain why it doesn’t belong on the list. There may be more than one answer, although I happen to have a specific one in mind. In this case, it doesn’t matter if the beer is still brewed or what country it is (or was) brewed in.

a) Lone Star Light
b) Bud Light
d) Brewhouse Light (Great Western Brewing)
d) Coors Light
e) Pabst Genuine Draft Light

In case you’ve forgotten: Round one ~ Round two ~ Round three ~ Round four ~ Round five ~ Round six.

Well into a review of Geroge Taber’s A Toast to Bargain Wines: How innovators, iconoclasts, and winemaking revolutionaries are changing the way the world drinks Mike Veseth at The Wine Economist wonders about what constitutes a bargain.

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?

Look closely at the label for TAPX “Mein Nelson Sauvin” from Private Weissbierbrauerei G. Schneider & Sohn. Those are hops. And the hops that make TAPX something different aren’t from Germany, but from New Zealand.

In this video Schneider produced to promote the new beer, available in limited quantities in the U.S. (my local store got six of the 750ml bottles), brewmaster Han-Peter Drexler says what’s been mentioned here before. That the Reinheitsgebot needn’t limit German brewers and that change happens slowly when it comes to beer in Germany. If you haven’t clicked on the video yet, go ahead, and at least hang around to get a look at the open fermentation vessels at Schneider. In Brewing With Wheat I try to describe what it’s like to stand in the midst of those tanks.

On his left yeast climbs high in a tank full of wort on its way to being the strong wheat doppelbock called Aventinus. On his right fermentation only recently started on what will be a batch of Schneider Original. A small hole opens in the middle of the yeast blanket, briefly revealing the wort below before closing again. It is alive.

Now you can see for yourself.

As the beer’s name suggests, the hop star is Nelson Sauvin, a cultivar noteworthy because of compounds¹ that give it exotic fruit-like and white wine-like flavors; a grapefruit and rhubarb aroma akin to sauvignon blanc wine.

In the video, Drexler is already talking about next year, the next beer. His boss, Georg Schneider IV, is a sixth generation owner and properly respectful of tradition. He’s also committed to change. “The German beer market is deadly boring,” he told Sylvia Kopp in 2008, for a story that appeared in All About Beer magazine. “It is all very much the same. The tendency towards sameness is encouraged, for example, by our domestic beer tests rating beer only by its typicality and flawlessness. Creativity is only acted on in the beer mix category.”

This was about the time his brewery did the collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery called Schneider & Brooklyner Hopfen-Weisse. Most of that first batch was shipped to the United States, with only 200 cases reserved for Germany. When we were in Kelheim that fall there was no Hopfen-Weisse to be found. Now when you visit the brewery restaurant you can order the beer. Small change, but a change.

“If you brew a beer that not everybody likes, you have the wonderful effect that people talk about it,” Schneider said in 2008. And Drexler added, “We’ve got to take people by the hand and lead them to new worlds of taste. Customers, as well as chefs, culinary staff and traders, are searching for innovations.”

The video concludes with Drexler laughing as he explains that TAPX creates a platform for something new every year. He obviously enjoys the thought. Perhaps not in 2012, but surely soon, he won’t have to look beyond Germany for a hop with aromas and flavors previously considered exotic and unhop-like (or should it be un-hop-like or unhoppy? – whatever tells you this isn’t what brewers meant by “hoppy” just a few years ago).

Brewers attending the giant industry trade show Brau Beviale 2011 in Nuremberg earlier this month got a chance to rub and sniff several new hop varieties being developed at the Hop Research Center in Hüll. These cultivars are just ready for their first brewing trials and have many more tests to pass in the field before they end up in any commercially brewed beer. They don’t even have names beyond their designation within the breeding program; for instance 2007/018/013 tastes of tangerine and 2009/001/718 of watermelon, with grapefruit-like notes and also the impression of honey.

It’s going to be hard for the German beer market to remain “deadly boring” with hops like these.

¹ 3-sulfanyl-4-methylpentan-1-ol and 3-sulfanyl-4-methylpentyl acetate for those of you scoring at home.