beers of conviction

Should you, do you, the smell the cork?

Lost Abbey corkI do like the sound of bottle of beer being uncorked, the pop followed by the lively sound of carbonation, or perhaps . . .

“Oh, bleep, we’ve got a gusher.”

Not to harp on the beer versus wine thing but that’s one thing beer has over wine (Champagne excepted). I thought about this a couple of weeks ago when I watched a waiter hand a customer in the restaurant a cork after he opened a bottle of wine. The man sniffed the cork and nodded, then the waiter poured a bit of wine. The man swirled and sniffed, then nodded again. The waiter went on to pour two full glasses.

Was there a point to this? I understand that sommeliers will sometimes smell a cork for a sign that a wine might be “corked” but it is hardly dependable. And beer is susceptible to the same problems with tainted corks.

But I don’t think you are going to catch me smelling the cork next time we have a bottle of Ommegang or Saint Somewhere or some other beer sold with a cork-and-cage top. Just doesn’t feel right.

 

Obamagang? You can’t call a beer that

How’s this for having fun?

Brewery Ommegang in New York’s specialty beer releases include a 6.2% abv draft only release just in time for Barack Obama’s inauguration. A company press release explains it will be called Inauguration Ale because . . .

“The TTB won’t let us call the beer Obamagang on the keg label. So it will be known legally as Inauguration Ale 2009, but the tap handles will be more . . . um . . . direct. The style lies between a porter and stout, with a bit of Kriek and a touch of chocolate blended in. It will be on draft only, beginning with the inauguration – in limited areas including DC, NYC, Syracuse, Philly, Chicago and Boston. We will donate a percentage of sales to charities in the respective cities where the beer is sold, and we’ve asked our distributors to match our donations and pick the local charities. (Also please note that the beer is not an endorsement of Obama.)”

 

Off topic: Songs of conviction

Well I used to run from the past
But the world got to spinnin’ so fast
I run from the future now
I run as fast as I can
Tryin’ to be a simple man
I just want to slow down.

               – Chris Knight

Heart of StoneBest recording of 2008? I spoke too soon.

When Sean Lilly Wilson asked for a few sentences for the Fullstream Brewery newsletter about the best “album” we purchased in 2008 I took the request seriously. Didn’t want to forget something because our long journey has experiences running together. So I re-listened to my finalists — James McMurtry, Billy Bragg, B.B. King, Randy Newman, Mary Gauthier and company.

What I found was a lot of recordings that I’ll listen to forever, dang good, but not quite great. So I picked “Another Country” from Tift Merritt, in part because her songwriting just keeps getting better and because, by a bit of luck in July, we caught a wonderful free concert in Burlington, Vermont. Or maybe just because she is from North Carolina and Fullstream is in North Carolina. A karma thing.

Not until the day after Christmas did I notice Chris Knight had released “Heart of Stone” a few days before we departed for Germany. Easy given the amount of press coverage he doesn’t receive, although his Amazon sales prove he’s got a bit of a following.

I’ve been listening to it a lot since. If you must drink at least two full servings (six is a better idea) of a beer before you evaluate it then you gotta listen to an album ten or a hundred times. Do the easy-to-listen-to-lyrics get cloying? Do you find something new and rewarding (kind of like the stuff in the background of a Simpson’s episode) each time, maybe as simple as the way he delivers a phrase?

This recording (it’s not an album or a CD; I bought a download) keeps getting better. Knight writes haunting lyrics — usually grim and sometimes violent &#151 about less-than-perfect lives. The music is dense whether acoustic (as the “Basement Tapes”) or with a rocking band in this recording. He’s a wonderful story teller, as opposed to telling stories about wonderful lives. Here’s an example from “Hell Ain’t Half Full”:

Get up in the morning
Fall out of bed
Go down to the basement
Cook up a little meth
All the young folks love it
Coming back for more
Ain’t it good to be working
Got your foot in the door

You’ve got to buy the recording to get the full story, and then maybe the five that came before it to begin understand what life lessons Knight has to offer. He’s a working guy from the blue collar town of Slaughters, Kentucky. You figure he might be a beer drinker, one of us, but even if he isn’t there’s a comparison to be made. Nashville and industrially produced beers on one side of the ledger, artists liked Chris Knight and the beers we drink on the other.

Chris Knight writes and sings songs of conviction.

Budweiser Budvar: Not so small

Compared to Anheuser-Busch, Budejovický Budvar in the Czech Republic — the other producer of Budweiser — is small. But there’s small, and there’s small.

Budvar brews more than a million hectoliters a year and soon will be able to make 1.3 million. I wouldn’t necessarily call that small. Here’s about a minute of video shot in the bottling hall, which also isn’t small. I used our pocket camera to record the video, so excuse the production quality. (If you click on over to YouTube to watch it, then hit “watch in high quality” it’s a little better.)

In contrast, Pilsner Urquell is so big that I’m not sure how you’d try to capture the bottling plant with a video. Then there is Berliner-Kindl-Schultheiss in Berlin, which brews 1.6 million hectos a year. The brewery has two plants within one hall, each aiming to package 50,000 bottles an hour. There’s a large display at each end which counts just how fast the line is running. The digital display will read 49,893 one second, 49,896 the next, then 49,894.

That’s a lot of beer.

 

Are American beers really THAT good?

Speaking of lists, your can read Beer Advocate magazine’s Planet Earth Top 25s at the Stone Brewing website.

I’m a little surprised that 23 of the All-Time Top Breweries are American. And that 22 of the top 25 Top Beer Bars are in the United States.

I’m a little surprised that I’ve had all 25 of the All-Time Top Beers (“New beers comes and go. These are the ones that stuck around.”), and I almost feel a sense of relief that only 17 of them are from North America. But I’m hardly shocked that 24 of the 25 are 6% abv or stronger, most much stronger (the average of the 24 is 8.5% abv).

OK, “a little surprised” might not be the best choice of words. Let’s try “appalled by such American arrogance.”