This bit of speculation from W. Blake Gray hit my radar too late to appear in the Monday links: “The Judgment of Paris tasting was the single most important event in the history of wine. In a 1976 blind tasting, French judges chose Napa Valley wines over the best of Bordeaux and Burgundy. The repercussions still echo to this day. But what if it never happened?”
His speculation — starting from a slightly different but important perspective, that the tasting happened, but Time magazine never reported it — is both amusing and illuminating. There must be a beer doppelgänger out there, right? Maybe we’re looking at a Session topic. Even though no beer event, event, incident, development, whatever, resonates like “Judgment of Paris” there’s got to be a starting point. What would it be?
Three quick contenders . . .
What if Fritz Maytag had not bought Anchor Brewing in 1965?
What if the committee charged in 1906 with interpreting the meaning of the Pure Food and Drug Act had decided to implement some sort of legal differentiation between all malt and adjunct beer, or enacted a proposal that lager beer be required to lager at least three months? (Both were considered and rejected.)
What if the USDA had not released the Cascade hop variety in 1972? The story.
Oh, yes, that would be a great session topic.
Martyn Cornell wrote a long piece for CAMRA’s 40th anniversary on what might have happened if the organisation had never been formed — not available online, sadly.
What if there’d been Kickstarter when New Albion started? Would it still be around?
Since I never manage to do the session, my hot take here.
There is no beer-world analogue. We would have ended up here in any case. The idea that beer would have remained the last holdout of midcentury industrial homogenization is unbelievable. In all other food and beverage spheres, we stepped back from that particular breech and rediscovered diversity and quality. If a person were going to argue that the absence of some particular event would have prevented the same thing from happening in beer, I’d ask him to explain the circumstances that prevented it. THAT would be a real challenge.
I agree, although it seems you are now taking my side (that you can eliminate any single brewery and you still have this Brave New Beer World) of our friendly off-line debate. But I think Gray’s essay is about something else. How it would be different. Until very recently, farmers grew a lot more Willamette (which also came out of the USDA program) than Cascade, but Cascade was far more influential.
Oh boy, now we’re wandering into pedantic territory! (My point has more to do with how beer developed in the US and how we got to American hoppy ales. Diversity was a given, but the preferences of Americans were not. How we got to hoppy American ales is a slightly different question. Had you asked, “would session IPAs exist if Ken Grossman never did?” I’d argue that no, they probably wouldn’t.
The Cascade v Willamette thing is a cul-de-sac of this question. Willamettes can be used to accent a lot of different beer styles and have the classic European character, so weren’t influential in developing the US palate in the way Cascades were. Because, of course, Ken Grossman. 🙂
My goal is to avoid pedantic – except over beer. I just wanted to point to the “alternative universe” idea. But it is hard to come up with a beer analogy to the idea that Judgment at Paris happens but is not reported – so some people acquire knowledge but not as many people.
Perhaps that Fritz Maytag does not buy Anchor, but some friend of August Busch III does. Busch begins to recognize the opportunity, things go from there.
If the lawmakers that banned imported hops to the NW for disease reasons had not written the entire name of the European hop (Humulus lupulus var. lupulus) throughout the documents, neomexicanus hops may have never even made it to WA for CLS to grow and for Sierra Nevada to brew with. 😉
sounds like you’ve volunteered yourself to host the june session Stan 😉
Maybe somebody will scoop up the idea before then.
I posted some thoughts on Gray’s article, which apply a fortiori to the beer situation, in fact I adverted briefly to Michael Jackson there.
We would have arrived at the same point – more or less. There were too many things happening such that one event, e.g., no Cascade, no Jackson, no Anchor in its post-Maytag form, could not have made for a very different scene.
There was never a Byron of the coffee world, but there was Starbucks and Seattle Coffee and espresso machines imported and old-style retailers in NYC and SF – it happened anyway. Maybe if a wonderful new coffee variety had been developed there would be an artisan scene in the way there isn’t now, but there is fair trade coffee and single estate and all the emblems of a connoisseur circle.
Coffee had a past, so it had the possibility of a renewed future.
And so with beer. Charlie Papazian and AHA were there, Charles Finkel was importing from Belgium, All About Beer magazine was there, CAMRA was there. Roger Protz would probably enjoy Jackson’s status now had MJ never existed. American writers of the prestige of, say, Robert Parker may have emerged.
Gary
A different Steve here. Am I reading that correctly, that an American Reinheitsgebot was proposed?
Steve – A catchy phrase, for sure, but not quite accurate. I think the discussion was about clearly labeling & and classifying rather than banning. The Pure Food Act was rightly concerned about toxic ingredients used in food products, and beer had been scrutinized for decades because of the addition of things that could make you sick or kill. Much different than arguing the impact of corn or rice (or lagering time) on flavor.