Stan Hieronymus

Headache ahead: Considering beer styles

Do you have a vested interest in whether a beer is a porter or a stout?

Do I?

Two words, but for me a two-part question.

* First, I drink beer. And I have an affection for imperial stouts. So if a beer is called “imperial porter” should I trifle with it?

You answered no? Flying Dog Gonzo Imperial Porter won the gold medal in the imperial stout competition at the 2008 World Beer Cup. So much for style guidelines holding a beer back. Just to be sure it still suits me I had a dram of the barrel-aged version just this past weekend. Flat out great.

That doesn’t mean that if I walk into a brewpub pub and happen to be in a dark-and-roasty mood I won’t look at the chalkboard listing beers and wonder just what the brewer intended when he chose to brew those “styles.” My solution is simple. I ask for a sample of each. Something you can do in a brewpub, but can’t at the beer store when confronted by a six-pack you haven’t seen before.

* Second, I write about beer. It is hard for me to avoid the concept of style, as mindbending as the discussions may be. But do I need to weigh in on the topic every time a spirited discussion breaks out on beerblogland? It seems I do this time.

“Does beer style matter? Does it mean anything?” was the topic at the British Guild of Beer Writers’ annual seminar this week. I suggest starting with Mark Dredge’s summation and questions that popped into his head (that’s where I stole the line at the top from), then the comments that followed.

Lots of fun reading resulted from that gathering — Pete Brown, Parts I and II, and Velkly Al for starters. And serious questions from Adrian-Tierney Jones.

More to come, I suspect, but I’m leaving it to others. Instead I suggest tomorrow we climb into the wayback machine and read what somebody other than Micheal Jackson was writing about styles in 1977 (the same year Jackson first published his World Guide to Beer). That should be fun.

Meanwhile, to the question Mr. Pencil & Spoon posed: “Beer Style: Does is it Matter?” In I moment I will signal WordPress it is time to publish these words. Then I will head to what here in the southwest constitutes a beer cellar (a chest freezer with a temperature controller). I will retrieve a beer, not a style. OK, the style might be “strong.”

I think the answer to the question is, “Not tonight.”

The ‘perfect’ beer & Gatsby’s green light

My favorite paragraph of the week, and I think you can connect the dots to beer:

“Robert Parker is no dictator. He is a storyteller. The magnetism of his prose is that of J.K. Rowling’s, too: you’re first presented with a set of familiar facts and situations, and then, slowly, you’re seduced into suspending reason and believing in the perfectly impossible. Escape into a Parker review, and for a few sentences, there you are, back in junior high, the great critic’s palate—and yours, too—cured of its nagging mortality. In this counterfactual place, there is no perceptual bias, just perception. There is no confidence interval, just confidence. Parker’s 100-point wine is Gatsby’s green light, the orgiastic ghost of taste’s future, the tongue a sudden lattice of infinite resolution, the nose a sudden instrument of preternatural whiff.”

– From Robin Goldstein’s review of Parker’s Wine Bargains: The World’s Greatest Wine Values Under $25. It might be a little wine centric for you on the whole, but the last few paragraphs are scrumptious.

‘Europe’s convivial drink!’

When do you know you’ve had at least one too many?

When you quit even trying to pronounce convivial and admit you should have stuck to session beers.

Today the Wall Street Journal examines “The Future of Beer in Europe.” Which isn’t looking all that great. Interesting timing for me since I just started reading Dethroning the King: The Hostile Takeover of Anheuser-Busch definitely more a book about business than beer.

I expect to make a serious dent in it tomorrow during my flight to Houston for Dixie Cup XXVII.

Anyway, Matthew Dalton writes, “the message is that ‘convivial’ drinking occupies a middle ground somewhere between not drinking at all and drinking so much that you collapse on the street in a pool of your own vomit.”

That’s the sweet spot I’ll be aiming for in Houston.

These monks are growing hops

A brewery is under construction.

The first hops crop is in.

An update on Monks’ Ale.

Just make sure your muffler is in good repair before tackling the last 13 miles of road on the way to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert northwest of Abiquiu, New Mexico.