Need I add more?
OK. Beer is food for thought. Beer is food for the soul.
But I’d rather keep NEW BEER RULE #10 that simple: Beer is food.
(Full disclosure: The idea for this rule was inspired by Alan McLeod’s question — “Why Does That Word ‘Pairing’ Make My Temples Ache?” — in response to Mark Dredge writing about the oft-mentioned topic of food and beer pairings. Excellent reading.)
NEW BEER RULE #9: You cannot know all there is to know about beer.
It’s fine to give it a shot. But no matter how positive you are about what you think you know there’s always a chance that Martyn Cornell or Ron Pattinson is going to dig up incontestable proof you are totally wrong.
Remain humble when talking about beer.
NEW BEER RULE #8: Always take beer more seriously than yourself.
This needs little explanation.
But to be clear, this is a beer rule. Not a life or work rule. The alternative version goes like this: Ask yourself if it’s the beer you are taking too seriously or yourself.
The rule popped into my mind not long after I hurriedly posted my Thursday morning musing, so here are those links again and one to a discussion that followed.
- Over Analysis Syndrome (from brewer Matt Van Wyk)
- Armchair Brewer Syndrome (from brewvana)
- Drinking the same beer way too long (from The Beer Mapping Project)
- Rating Beer Raters? (Rate Beer discussion – Matt must still be amazed what he wandered into)
You connect the dots.
Last night we ate leftover smoked meat and drank Southern Tier Choklat. One, then the other. No pairing involved. Sometimes you just want a beer, maybe even a strong one.
Choklat, an 11% abv imperial stout infused with dark Belgian chocolate, qualifies on both counts. It’s one of the beers I’ll be writing around 85 words about in the next All About Beer magazine Beer Talk.
You’ll notice these days that more often than not Beer Talk panelists suggest a food pairing for the beer they are describing. I tend to be the slacker. I know that Charles Finkel, who tastes the same beers as I, will have terrific suggestions and I try to use the small space alloted to squeeze in something different.
I’m keener than most about the notion beer belongs at the table, but these days the movement hardly seems to need my help. For instance, the Brewers Association yesterday revealed new details about “SAVOR: An American Craft Beer & Food Experience,” including something called educational salons. These are presentations by “savvy cross drinkers.”
I guarantee you that the words “Beer is the new wine” will be bandied about.
What does that mean? I really don’t know. The phrase doesn’t seem to serve beer or wine well. Wine is the new wine. Beer is the new beer. (And the old beer, which is equally important.)
Beer “styles” have always evolved, with various riffs sometimes turning evolution into revolution. This is nothing new. In the 1930s it was the monks at Westmalle refining the “tripel” style. These days it might be two brothers in a former hardware store in Warren, Mich., inventing something new or an ex-English major in San Diego blending mead, strong ale and sour beer to create Veritas (Latin for truth).
Truth is it’s still beer.
NEW BEER RULE #7: Beer is still beer.
NEW BEER RULE #6: The best beer was in the empty glass.
This rule came from a conversation with Matt Trevisan of Paso Robles winery Linne Calodo for an upcoming story, and he was explaining how he blends wines.
“I start with five glasses and I pick the emptiest one,” he said. “In the end you want the blend that you keeping going back to.”
Trevisan sat in on the blending session last year when Paso Robles winemakers helped the brewers at Firestone Walker assemble the highly acclaimed Firestone 10.
“I told them they didn’t have to sit there and pick it apart to find the best one,” Trevisan said, offering advice that works for wine or beer. “You didn’t necessarily want the one you had the most to say about. Ultimately it’s a beverage to enjoy.”
How you use this rule is up to you. But I think it is a pretty good excuse to haul a treasured beer out of the cellar even though you know you’ll never be able to replace it, or a reason to spend a little bit more for a bottle.
All the New Beer Rules.
Credit for this one goes to Don Younger, publican of the Horse Brass Pub in Portland.
Exhibit A: Last week’s Session, in which the guys at Hop Talk challenged bloggers to write about atmosphere. We’re talking about dozens of folks who take the time to write about beer several times a week.
And what did they focus on?
Early on, it became quite clear that there was a nearly universal theme as to what made for a good beer drinking atmosphere: people.
Exhibit B: Don Younger and the Horse Brass Pub. Now we’re talking people.
There are various stories about how Younger acquired the Horse Brass, but what’s certain is that it wasn’t until after he owned it that he decided to find out just what an English pub was. So he headed to Great Britain in 1977. “That’s when I knew,” he said. What, he wasn’t yet sure, “but I was going to do the pub thing.”
Fast forward to 1995, the evening of the last day of the Oregon Brewers Festival. We had arrived in town before the festival started, and spent an intense several days visiting pubs and brewpubs in the metropolitan area, some with Don and many more he suggested. He talked about influences, about history, about Oregon brewers (some gone), about pubs. Several times over.
We didn’t expect to see him at the Horse Brass that evening. We’d just stopped by for one last pint before leaving town. But he showed up at our table and had a seat. Soon it seemed half the people in the pub had stopped by and the conversation naturally centered on beer. What do you think of Portland’s bars? The brewpubs? What beers did you try at the festival?
Then at one moment Younger leaned back in his chair and smiled. You could see him almost eavesdropping on scores of conversations taking place around him, most of them not about beer.
“After all,” he said, “it is only beer.”
How’s that for perspective?
NEW BEER RULE #4: The god of beer is not consistency.
Full credit for this rule goes to Mark Dorber, the venerable British publican who uttered these words in 1996 at the first Real Ale Festival in Chicago.
He was speaking specifically about cask-conditioned ale, but the rule applies fairly to most small-batch beers.
This doesn’t mean that a beer needn’t be consistently good; only that it doesn’t have to taste the same every batch. Or in the case of cask beer, the same the second day it is on dispense as the first. Or in the case of a beer that you might cellar for a few years the same two years into the process as five years in.
Look, same is OK. It’s what most people seem to want. That’s why Anheuser-Busch goes to incredible lengths to make sure beers such as Budweiser – brewed in 12 different plants in the United States and other around the world – taste the same no matter where they come from. They don’t want us commenting on the nuances of Newark (New Jersey) Bud versus those of Fort Collins (Colorado) Bud.
Small batches lend themselves to greater variability. Hop varieties taste different not only from year to year, but from lot to lot – depending, for instance, if they are grow high on a hill or in the lowlands of a rolling hop district. The same may true for barley that will be turned into malt. (And then there are process differences, etc., but let’s keep this short).
Large breweries may blend to minimize differences. Not so small-batch brewers. “We’re going to have variability from batch to batch,” said Great Divide Brewing founder Brian Dunn. “I think the flavor profile doesn’t change enormously, not enough that drinkers necessarily notice.”
This is why it is silly for Consumer Reports to rate beers (see what Ron at Hop Talk has to write about that), and just another reason that assigning a number to a beer doesn’t work for me.
Back in the 1980s, Michael Jackson discussed consistency with Roger Schoonjans, then brewing director at Belgium’s famed Brasserie d’Orval. “People should not want our beer to taste exactly the same every time,” he said. “They want the gout d’Orval (flavor of Orval), for sure, but they want to be able to chat about it: ‘I think this one is a little more hoppy — yesterday’s was rounder . . . .’ In that respect, they treat it like wine.”
You don’t have treat your beer like wine to appreciate that worshiping at the foot of consistency means that you’d be giving up something you should not want to.
