beer & wine

Brewing naked, ‘trading up’ and a ‘super boil’

Ancient recipe for beer

This is a “map cartouche of one of the Western Hemisphere’s earliest recorded recipes (for a form of beer).” It was taken from from America, a map by Jodocus Hondius (Amsterdam, 1606). Seems like a poster that would sell well in homebrew shops.

You’ll find it here, along with dozens of other images from the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and more about the growing American culinary history collection at the library.

* Trading up to beer (and then to wine). A working paper from the American Association of Wine Economists exams the evolution of beer consumption between countries and over time. Parts are easier to understand if you have an Economics to English dictionary at your side.

Although the focus is on economics, the authors look at all the factors that determine what makes a “beer drinking nation.” In doing so, they track how consumption in those nations has changed dramatically in the past 50 years and ask why. Their findings, in economic speak:

Our first important result is that we do indeed find an inverted-U shaped relation between income and per capita beer consumption in all pooled OLS ánd fixed effects specifications. From the pooled OLS regressions (Table 3), we find that countries with higher levels of income initially consume more beer. Yet, the second order coefficient on income is negative, indicating that from a certain income level onwards, higher incomes lead to lower per capita beer consumption. The first and second order effects for income are strongly significant and the coefficients are quite robust across the different specifications.

The fixed effects regression results confirm this (Table 4), so the non-linear relationship for income holds not only between countries, but also within individual countries over time. As a country becomes richer, beer consumption rises, but when incomes continue to grow, beer consumption starts to decline at some income level. We calculated the turning point, i.e. the point where beer consumption starts declining with growing incomes, to be approximately 22,000 US dollars per capita.

So you get a graph that looks like this, with beer sales soaring in emerging economies — quite obviously China, but also Russia, Brazil and India.

World beer consumption 1961-2007

What the wine economists want to know is “what’s next?” As consumers grow richer will they spend more money on wine (and less on beer)? The Chinese effect has already boosted prices of high-end French wines. Most predict something similar with wines across all prices categories, although that might be 20 years off.

What the study doesn’t consider at all is “beer different,” as in not a commodity, the beers drinkers are “trading up” to on a regular basis, in just about any country where they can find them.

* ‘Extreme’ boiling. Port Brewing/Lost Abbey has begun a “behind the scenes” video series, the first featuring how it makes Hot Rocks Lager. This is an Old World beer, certainly not “extreme.” But the process is a little out of the ordinary, and might just be what it looks like to make beer in Hell. Tomme Arthur calls it a “super boil,” and it is. Pay close attention beginning about 1:40 into the video.

 

Beer or wine: Telling the truth a good place to start

Curious timing. Today Evan Benn (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) asks the question, “What’s in your beer? Labels should tell you.” And at the Wine Spectator website columnist Matt Kramer asks something that it turns out to be related: “If You Owned a Winery … What would you do differently?”

Benn looks at a government proposal for beer labels that small brewery owners don’t like. He’s not buying their objections. Good for him. Granted, it’s complicated, there may be issues I don’t know about and the whole “standard-drink” discussion confuses it further.

However, even though Kramer writes about wine, his discussion about labels is just a relevant to beer. Take a quick look at this photo (from shortly after La Cumbre Brewing in Albuquerque opened in December).

What's on tap at La Cumbre Brewing in Albuquerque

A lot of facts, stuff that a lot of people don’t care about. Ask the person pouring beer a question and he or she may provide even more information — about the ingredients, or about process, or just what the brewer was thinking. Again, stuff of interest to a relative few. But if you do want to know you can find out. Labels should provide useful information and honest stories. And QR codes further extend that opportunity.

Here’s the CliffNotes version of Kramer’s list. You should be able to figure out where to plug in the word beer.

* I Would Tell the Truth.
“This may seem overly simplistic. But I’m here to testify that it’s nothing less than astonishing to see the number of times a winery sidesteps, obfuscates, or flat-out lies about its practices in the winery or its reasons for pursuing a particular course of action.”

* I Would Speak Up.
“The key point is not to hamstring yourself, but rather differentiate yourself from those who want your artisanal image but are not willing to pay your price.”

* I Would Recognize That My Label Is Really a Portal.
“I would redesign it in recognition that the label is—or should be—an invitation to the prospective customer to acquire yet more information about what’s inside the bottle.”

* I Would Always Hire Wine People.
“There’s a trend, especially among very big wineries or small producers seeking to break into the luxury category, to hire people from fields other than wine.”

* I Would Ask Myself, “Am I A Me-Too Winery?”
“The only way to become above-average is to impose a demand that what you offer is indeed superior.”

Whither beer blogs (redux)?

There is something terribly circular about this. What follows is inside baseball, blogging about blogging instead of the beer itself.

I asked last year if anybody really reads beer blogs (other than other bloggers), pointing to a post at Palate Press digging into why wine blogs fail their readers (so don’t have many).

Today Jeff Siegel at the Wine Curmudgeon dives into a report from the United Kingdom’s Wine Intelligence that independent bloggers are one of the least trusted wine information sources in the United Kingdom, United States, and France.

Its study found that only one in five regular wine drinkers in the U.K. trust what independent bloggers say about a wine, compared with more than 50 percent who trust their wine merchant. In the U.S., the numbers were 20 percent and 80 percent, while only 10 percent of the French trusted bloggers.

Siegel went beyond the headline stuff — which caused a major stir in wine blogdom (like here) without most of the world noticing — to find another key number: 84 percent of the respondents in the U.K. said they didn’t read wine blogs.

This is the number (probably different in the U.S., and also different when it comes to beer blogs) Siegel chooses to focus on.

At this stage of the 21st century, most wine drinkers have access to the Internet and are well educated and Web savvy enough so that they can read any wine blog that’s out there. But that this affluent and sophisticated demographic doesn’t even know to look speaks to a serious problem with wine blogging. And it’s a problem that we perpetuate.

We’re too parochial, focusing on too much on the inside baseball kind of stuff that we like and that most consumers could care less about. I enjoy writing posts like this, and I think it’s important that I do it. But they are usually among the least well read posts on the blog. Wine drinkers want wine reviews.

I added the boldface — Siegel links to his most popular posts in 2010 to prove his point.

I suspect beer drinkers are much the same.

That’s enough inside baseball talk. Tomorrow back to inside beer talk.

Beer, wine, forests, trees

It was pointed out more than once yesterday in the comments to my take on how a famous wine writer sees the world of beer and beer drinkers I missed an important point.

He represents the way most people think.

That was even clearer this morning when Max checked in from the Czech Republic, commenting on an article from an Argentine newspaper headlined, “Five qualities from wine that beer watches and envies”. (His translation; it was in Spanish.)

Another list. Another occasion for deep breaths. And an excellent conclusion.

Before you scream “Bollocks!” you should be aware that this is not the way we see beer, but the way the average consumer does, and that, although the article speaks about Argentina, it could be very well applied to many other countries.

Well put.

Here’s a wine guy who needs to get out more

Steve Heimoff is one of the best wine writers out there. I own a couple of his books. But today’s post looks like something written in 1984 or so, although the Wine Market Council presentation was two days ago.

(Before going on, because this could get ugly, I’ll remind you that the category is Beer & Wine, not Beer vs. Wine.)

Heimoff points with particular interest to data compiled by The Nielsen Company.

WINE BEER
I like well-known brands:    1    34
I like to explore new brands:    42    5

I guess the numbers are percentages. Anyway, let’s get right to his analysis: “In other words, beer drinkers stick with their tried-and-true favorites (Bud Lite, Coors, whatever) and rarely venture outside their comfort zone. Wine drinkers by contrast are 8 times more likely to be adventurous and try something new.” [We won’t deduct points because he might have confused Bud Light and Miller Lite.]

Then why are the beers the Brewers Association defines as “craft” rockin’ ‘n’ rollin’ in supermarkets? SymphonyIRI data certainly indicates beer drinkers are exploring like crazy.

So perhaps his guesses at “why” would be rendered moot with different numbers in mind. But it is so seldom somebody puts together a list of six points and gets every one wrong that it deserves to be repeated.

1. wine is inherently more interesting than beer.
2. wine changes with each vintage and people know that whereas beer always tastes the same.
3. wine drinkers listen more to gatekeepers, such as critics, than do beer drinkers.
4. wine is so much better with food than beer.
5. there are so many more wine brands than beer brands to choose from.
6. most importantly, wine drinkers are more adventurous than beer drinkers because we’re risk takers, curious, liberal, open to improving ourselves and our lives, smarter (but don’t think we know everything), and more hopeful than beer drinkers, who, for all their charms, are (let’s face it) happiest with a kegger and an ample supply of beer nuts.

(Remember, deep breaths.)

Added Jan. 28 (the next day): He says he was kidding. Just wish he hadn’t written “brewski” in doing so.