All About Beer

The Session #72: Beer love

I guess we’ve come full circle
We’re strangers once again
It’s hard to know we’d ever come to this
It’s funny you were saying how you’d miss
The good ole times
While all alone I’m thinking
You’re the one I’ll miss

Love’s a word I never throw around
So when I say I love you ’til the end
I’m talking about ’til the day
They toss me in the ground
Love’s a word I never throw around

        – Robert Earl Keen, “Love’s a Word I Never Throw Around”

The Session

For the 72nd gathering of The Session host Ryan Newhouse asks contributors write about “How We Love Beer.” The key word, he points out, is how. “I’m not looking for what characteristics beer has that makes us love it, but what we do to show our love for it.”

One of my personal rules when I write about anything is to question everything, including myself. In this case the question is: Do I write about beer, in this space and elsewhere, because I have a taste for it, because I’m addicted to collecting stories and retelling them, or because writing about beer is my primary source of income?

The answer is B and C, but of course there is another question. One I continue to consider more than five years after Michael Jackson wrote this mysterious paragraph, at least mysterious to me, in a column that appeared in All About Beer magazine after he died.

Being a critic is one of the things I do for a living. Being a reporter is another. Is a reporter a fearless seeker-out of truth, neutral and objective? Or does he recruit those qualities in support of his personal passions? When I enlisted, at the age of sixteen, I may have been attracted by the powerful purity of the first role. In the event, I grew into the second.

I would have liked to have asked him just what he meant there, about the reporter part, not the critic part. Not that I would necessarily have agreed with him, but because it seems to me thinking about such matters may result in better beer writing. And although showing a little love for beer in general is not my primary goal in improving how I write about the topic, it’s probably a side effect.

Enough about me. Tomorrow it’s back to writing about beer, maybe Clydesdales and Budweiser Black Crown, or perhaps how the distortion of the essential oil composition during isolation by steam distillation can significantly interfere with hop analysis and cause imprecise quantification of key compounds. I might be kidding.

Beer magazines, circa 1994

BeeR the MagazineInspired (again) by “The 5 Most Boring Topics in all of Beer Journalism” here’s a glimpse at what appeared in three magazines at the end of 1994.

I picked 1994 because BeeR the Magazine was new (and not long for this world) and because many the breweries that claim a lot more ink (or bandwidth) these days than do the founding pioneers weren’t yet in business. Although they are deserving, I didn’t include brewspapers (such at Celebrator, Ale Street News and the Brewing News family) because our archives were destroyed in the Flood of ’06.

All About Beer, BeeR and American Brewer were then the big three of glossy magazines. About the time BeeR died Beer Connoisseur I passed through town (lasting not even as long as BeeR). These days, of course, we have DRAFT, Beer Connoisseur (unrelated to V1.0), Beer Advocate and Beer Magazine, plus Imbibe offering regular beer features. You’ll spot many of these on the top row at Barnes & Noble or Borders, safely out of the reach of children. (American Brewer lives on, by the way. It always targeted the beer trade but in the 1990s also served information-thirsty beer newcomers.)

ALL ABOUT BEER (November)

Features
* Born to Brew – A look inside the brewing dynasties.
* Vietnamese Beers
* Pubcrawling Toronto

Columns
* Michael Jackson’s Journal – Czechs & Balances.
* Fred Eckhardt – Brewspeak: A Beginner’s Guide to Craft Beer.
* Alan Eames – On Groaning Beer and Babies.
* Byron Burch – Stylistically speaking, Oktoberfest.

Departments
These included news, homebrewing, Lucy Saunders on festival foods, collectibles, brewpub visits, book reviews and “Beer Talk.” The beers reviewed: Abita Amber, Labatt Blue, Purgatory Porter (it was spoiled), Redhook ESB, Berghoff Dark, Christoffel Blond, JJ Wainwright’s Select Lager, Red Tail Ale.

BEER (November)
That’s the cover at the top. BeeR was the brainchild of Bill Owens, who also published American Brewer. From the beginning Owens, himself a well known photographer, attracted very talented illustrators and photographers, although the magazine lasted only about a dozen issues.

Table of Contents
* A Question of Taste – A sensory exploration.
* The Art Guys – Using beer stuff to create art.
* The New Art of Ale – Randy Mosher on America’s innovative ales.
* Smuggler’s Brews – Snagging a few pilsners in Iraq.
* Garbage Pail Willie’s Last Great Batch – A story of homebrewed beer in Chicago.
* Plastic, Fantastic Brewpub – Northwestern Brew-Pub & Cafe in Portland, Oregon.
* Biere Au Naturel – Organic beer.
* A Glass of Wendy – Written by Garrison Keillor (yes, that Garrison Keillor).
* Proclaiming & Declaiming – Two Scottish musicians prefer stout.
* Eat Me, I’m on Irish Time – Kelly’s Irish Times in Washington, D.C.
* Das Münich Bierfest ist Goodt – Oktoberfest in Munich.
* Germany’s Other Brewfest – Oktoberfest in Stuttgart.
* Sing a Drinking Song – Beer at music festivals.
* Europe on a Gallon a Day – Tips from Tim Webb.
* A Really Cold One – Beer ice cream recipes.
* Book Reviews
* Michael Jackson – “On Meretricious Myths and the Sweet Taste of Truth.”
* Homebrewing – Charlie Papazian.
* Beer Festivals – Various reviews.

AMERICAN BREWER

Features
* 1994’s Best Tap Handles
* Financing on Tap – Tips for raising capital.
* Reviving Cincinnati’s Brewing Heritage
* Beer Engines in New England
* Interview with Paul Shipman of Redhook. Headline “Dark Clouds Over Paradise.”
* Rogue Ales in Japan
* Star Union – An Illinois brewery reborn.
* The Perennial Hop – In the American Northwest.
* Music Festivals – A different story than in BeeR. Bill Owens sometimes asked writers to rework pieces to suit his two magazines.
* Micro Goes Macro – Gordon Biersch.

Departments
Regular features included a column by Dick Cantwell (who still has a column in AB), a report on festivals, classified ads for brewing equipment, and BeerScopes (as stupid as the name implies).