Month: February 2010

I’ll have the sturgeon beer, thank you

Sometimes we are our own context, meaning what you bring to a glass of beer influences what you take from it.

Rick Lyke writes about a 7-year-old bottle of Schlenkerla Urbock, his daily drink Monday, that opened with a big smoked ham nose. A fellow taster from Wisconsin taster said it was like smoked sturgeon.

Drinkers in Bamberg, Germany, where Schlenkerla beers are brewed, most associate them with meat, but in Wisconsin — home to Friday evening fish fries — smoke and fish makes perfect sense. The same in Alaska.

That wasn’t something Geoff and Marcy Larson of Alaskan Brewing necessarily considered when they first brewed Alaskan Smoked Porter more than 20 years ago. In fact, Geoff Larson didn’t react very well the first time a drinker told him his beer tasted like salmon. In fact he had smoked the malt that went into the beer at a fish smokery, but he had cleaned the facility obsessively in advance, fearing how fish oil might affect the beer.

“I took it inappropriately and defensively,” Larson said. Months after, talking to the late Greg Noonan — who had made his own smoked porter at Vermont Pub & Brewery — he began to understand just how powerful memories of smoke are.

“Greg talked about first using hickory and customers would ask if he put hickory smoked ham in the beer,” Larson said. “Then he used maple and they asked, ‘Hey, did you start throwing sausage in your beer?'”

It wasn’t salmon that drinkers noticed but the alder wood both the malt and fish were smoked over. In Southeast Alaska smoke from alder wood conjures up memories of campfires and smoked salmon. In the northeast maple smoke reminds consumers of Jimmy Dean Sausage.

 

 

‘Drinking games’ in The New Yorker

The current (February 15 & 22) of The New Yorker magazine includes an article by Malcom Gladwell called “Drinking Games” that tackles a bit of drinking and culture. Unfortunately it’s not one the magazine chose to make free online, but you can read the abstract here.

Hey, it’s The New Yorker and Gladwell, so ideas all over the place. Two to consider:

  • Gladwell writes : “When confronted with the rowdy youth in the bar, we are happy to raise his drinking age, to tax his beer, to punish him if he drives under the influence, and to push him into treatment if his habit becomes an addiction. But we are reluctant to provide him with a positive and constructive example of how to drink.”
  • He also writes: “Put a stressed-out drinker in front of an exciting football game and he’ll forget his troubles. But put him in a quiet bar somewhere, all by himself and he’ll grow mare anxious. Alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental field of vision.” This is called “alcohol myopia,” and you can read more about it here.

    • Reading Gladwell it is always good to remember something Steve Pinker wrote in reviewing What the Dog Saw, a collection of Gladwell pieces.

    The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.

    More than anything the article raises questions I wish more people thought about.

     

     

    Innovation, corporate style

    Four Innovation Lessons from Anheuser-Busch.
    (Thanks to Lager Heads for the, well, heads up).

    It’s popular to write that [fill in the name of a large brewing company] could replicate any beer in the world if it really wanted to. But could it? Would its corporate culture let it?

    Think of any innovative beer you cherish popular beer of the moment (amended 2.13.2010 to make the conversation about beer rather than marketing terms) — last weekend it might have been Pliny The Younger, this weekend Red Poppy 2010. Think these beers are a result of a “team” getting together, a bunch of test batches, focus groups, middle managers and upper managers signing off on everything?

    Or one person, could be a single crazy and could be a few like-minded we-work-together collaborators, saying screwitthiswillbegreat?

     

     

    When American hops sucked . . .

    The United States became a net exporter of hops in the 1870s, so somebody must have liked varieties grown in America. In fact, exactly 100 years ago the U.S. exported 10.5 million pounds of hops and imported 3.2 million. Eighty percent of the exports went to England, while almost all the imports came from Germany and Austria-Hungary (thus Bohemia, where Saaz hops were grown).

    Yet consider this from article in The Edinburgh Review from 1862, only a few years before the U.S. began exporting more hops than it imported:

    “American hops may also be dismissed in a few words. Like American grapes, they derive a course, rank flavour and smell from the soil in which they grow, which no management, however careful, has hitherto succeeded in neutralising. There is little chance in their competing in our market with European growth, except in season of scarcity and of unusually high prices.”

    Think how you’d feel if you were a grower and read that at Rate Hops or Hop Advocate?