Month: February 2008

Laugh so hard beer comes out your nose

Child at barWe’re yukking it up in beer world today. (Except for these guys.)

– First, Bill at It’s Pub Night put an empty bottle of Deschutes The Abyss up for auction on eBay.

You know the drill from Tomme Arthur’s article, “The value of the item is in the collectible container, blah, blah, blah.”

Somebody bid on the bottle. Conversations broke out at Beer Advocate and at Rate Beer.

Go read it.

Laugh.

Me, I’ve got to go dig out my bottle of The Abyss. When I wrote about Lost Abbey The Angel’s Share for The Session somebody asked me if I was going to put the empty bottle on eBay. I laughed. I recycled. What a dunce.

– Moving along. Stephen Beaumont figures out what to do with a press kit that showed up on a variety of doorsteps last week. Including mine. This came in a nifty wood box, black wood on top and light on the bottom (it promotes a “Black & Tan”). Looks to me like a prize for the New Mexico State Fair beer competition.

The kit introduces us to the concept of a “brolly.” What? Google sent me to Wikipedia.

Being a bolder journalist, Beaumont sets out to use the instructions that came with the kit to pour a Black & Tan. Reading his description makes me think it would be a video on YouTube.

1) Pouring Bass or almost any beer, directly down the center of the glass, as the instructions suggest, is an idiotic move. I wound up with about a quarter of a glass of beer and three-quarters of foam, forget having room for stout or even the “Brolly.”

2) After I poured the Bass in correctly – ie: down the side of an angled glass, allowing for one to two fingers of foam to form – I put the “Brolly” in place and immediately overflowed its sides, causing the predictable mixing of the beers. “Slowly” is obviously a key part of the instructions.

It made me laugh.

And wonder what an empty bottle of Bass would bring on eBay.

About that mom breast-feeding at the bar

Child at barFull disclosure: Our daughter had been in more than 100 breweries before she was two years old. Not that she remembers any of them. Not everybody thought this was a good idea, but we sure learned some interesting facts about strange state laws, such as in Washington.

So stories such as yesterday’s in the New York Times about a Brooklyn bar posting a sign that reads “Please, No Strollers” get our attention, particularly with a catchy headline like, “Look Who’s Getting Rolled Out of the Bar.”

The story also makes reference to Wetherspoons in the UK implementing a limit on how many beers parents could drink in a pub. Which gives me an excuse to point to this quotable commentary from Stonch:

Presumably this is aimed at reducing the number of ankle-biters in your local ‘Spoons. Lots of people would prefer to ban children from pubs altogether, so perhaps the policy will have its supporters. However, there’s something annoying and petty about it. Back in September, we had a discussion about daft rules in pubs. I’d like to add this one to them.

The Times story explores pub culture, but considerably more, including the Gen X lifestyle (attention, Alan).

Which is probably why it kicked off an incredible long conversation. There should be more than 300 posts by the time you get there, and they are all over the map.

Worth reading, although I must admit my favorite doesn’t necessarily advance the discussion. I don’t care. Read it and smile.

“This is outrageous. Divisive issues such as this threaten to tear the Democratic party apart. We need to show a united front to the GOP, yet our very babies and being used as would be badminton birds. Anyway, why strollers? In my day, we lashed our babies to our bodies with rawhide strips. Babies could gnaw on the strips when teething time came around. When the strips rotted away, the baby fell to the ground and toddling time began. The toddler was given a crust of bread and sent out to make his way in the world, coming home for snack time and story time. Having a baby lashed to you means your body gets toned like no pilates workout would. As the baby gets bigger and bigger, you get stronger and stronger from the increasing resistance. The great world champion Bulgarian powerlifters of the 1970s pushed this technique to the limit in their training and kept their children bound to them well into their teenage years. We should not argue with their success. If these mothers would use these traditional methods, combined with a serape to conceal the baby, this would be a non-issue. For the sake of Democratic unity, I implore the mothers of Brooklyn to use the time honored method of rawhide strips and serapes, and let the healing begin. A ravaged nation awaits your decision and salutes your sacrifice.”

Surely “Contemplator, Kansas City” is a beer drinker.

Monday musing: UK’s good beer news overlooked

Roger Protz rightfully asks why the British press hasn’t been all over the news that beer sales by members of the Society of Independent Brewers were up nearly 11% in 2007.

This stunning success story – at a time when giant global brewers are reporting a sharp downturn in sales in Britain – has been met by a resounding silence by the media.

Michael Hardman, SIBA’s press officer, tells him, “This is a great British success story – but nobody wants to know.”

Protz pulls no punches:

The reason is not hard to understand: the media is obsessed with “24-hour” drinking” and “binge drinking” and doesn’t want to write about a good beer story. As Hardman adds, “If you substituted ‘beer’ in the report with the word ‘wine,’ the media would be falling over themselves to write glowing stories.”

It’s not like the ongoing success of “craft” brewers in the United States doesn’t get pretty good coverage.

Philly Beer Week– I’ve tried not to spend too much time looking at the Philly Beer Week schedule. I know my head would blow up were attending an option. And that’s a best case scenario. If it didn’t then I’d surely destroy at least some of my internal plumbing. They should call it Philly Hedonist Week. Best I stay here in New Mexico.

But it does make you think about Philadelphia boldly declaring itself “America’s Best Beer-Drinking City.” This has led Stephen Beaumont and Don Russell to debate Philadelphia’s beer cred in Ale Street News. (So far just in print, but look for the story to pop up online.)

I’d say I was staying out of it, but since last week I casually mentioned that any such debate begins and ends with Portland, Oregon (see, Jeff, I wrote it again), I’ve already taken a stand.

Were I getting further involved I certainly would use Russell’s post Saturday about the demise of Ludwig’s as evidence for whatever other side. Geez, if Gibson City, Illinois, can support a German restaurant with a solid beer selection shouldn’t America’s Best Beer-Drinking City?

– Conversations here sometimes go directions I would not have anticipated. One last week about buying habits of Gen Yers turned into a discussion about authenticity. Enough to talk about that Lew Bryson then added much you should read at his blog, including an important comment.

I meant everything I said at the beginning of the post about what “authentic” means to me, and that’s what I want…but I want to define it for myself, and I would just as soon not see claims for it made by brewers when it’s not clear what it does mean.

A reminder we all our own definitions, and biases. Me, when I read something like this from Beerdrinker of the Year finalist Matt Venzke I want to shout hallelujah:

“Small breweries are one of the few remaining vestiges of local uniqueness. Internationally, breweries reflect the local character, history and flavor.”

Your mileage may vary.

Beer links you shouldn’t miss

HopsStuff I marked this past week to muse about on Monday (but there’s not going to be room for). In case you haven’t already hit these links do it now:

– Tomme Arthur’s “Last Call” in Beer Advocate magazine — on the subject of auctioning beer on eBay — ignited a thread at BA that’s gone past 200 posts. Arthur since added the open letter to eBay on his blog at Lost Abbey so I suggest starting with that, then scooting over to BA.

– Evan Rail writes about protected status for the term “Czech beer.”

But labels can only do so much. If consumers don’t pay attention to how beers actually taste — buying, for example, low-quality brews ostensibly produced from high-quality ingredients — the term “Czech beer” could end up being a distinction without much difference.

A distinction without much difference — I’ve definitely had too many of those beers.

– Sign me up for the Friday brewery tour at Cricket Hill in New Jersey. The brewery has posted two videos at YouTube (thanks to Lew Bryson for pointing this out). At the risk of having my beer geek status revoked, I’m of the opinion that Rick Reed is less than fair to Bud and Coors. But he sure is entertaining.

– Burton Ale, Burton Ale, Burton Ale. Why you should have Shut up About Barclay Perkins on your RSS reader.

– And although James McMurtry has referred to himself as a “beer salesman” while performing, this is in truth a non-beer link. No point in watching the Grammy Awards tonight, since I’m pretty sure prizes for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album, Best Zydeco Or Cajun Music Album and every other category we’d care about will be presented off-air. Instead head on over to McMurtry’s MySpace page and listen a while.

(Choctaw Bingo will get you properly psyched for “Breaking Bad” on AMC, because who can resist a show that centers around selling meth in Albuquerque? They shot one of the scenes in the first episode at the library where Daria works. It’s available online.)

Hops: Ugh, the saga continues

HopsPart of it is pure chance because several beer periodicals just hit the streets, but this seems to have been particularly dreary week for hops news.

The newest issue of All About Beer magazine devotes a chunk of its news section to the hops shortage. Every regional edition of the Brewing News family of “brewspapers” has a story about hops, with the word crisis appearing way too much. Some of it is just print lagging behind what we already knew.

But I also heard a couple of nasty rumors this week that need investigating. It’s starting to look like a visit to the Yakima Valley in May and to the hops fields in Bavaria and Slovenia later this year will be fact-finding missions.

Alpha apparently trumps aroma these days, so it’s not just the future of IPAs we’re discussing.

At mid-week Bill Brand delivered a double whammy with a story for the Bay Area newspapers about beer prices going up, with more details from brewers in his blog.

Many of the horror stories you’ve read are about smaller breweries that didn’t, a perhaps still don’t, have contracts. They were left to buy what they needed on the spot market, which has been just plain ugly. But Brand talks to brewers who have contracts for this year, and they aren’t feeling too comfortable.

They shouldn’t. Consider, for instance, the recent story that India’s beer market will soon rival China. Those guys are going to need a lot of hops.

China already does. China produced 1.2 million hectoliters of beer in 1970, 251 million in 2003. That’s right, from one to two-hundred and fifty-one. In contrast, between 1992 and 2006 world hop acreage dropped from 236,000 to 113,000. Granted, farmers have become more efficient but that’s a lot of acres.

(It’s really an aside, but such a stunning number it merits passing along: UK hop farmers worked 53,500 acres in 1850, but tend to 2,400 today.)

Yes, China and India also will need a LOT more barley malt, and higher prices for malt are a major reason you are seeing $1 a six-pack prices increases as the pump. But — so far, at least — nobody is talking about the same sort of fundamental shift in what varieties of malt are available as they are when discussing hops.

Does anybody know where I can buy a “Save the aroma hops” T-shirt?