musing

Curtis at HopHeadSaid hosts The Session #55, asking contributors to to write about “fabulous world of beer art found on coasters, labels and caps.” This is my contribution. Check out what everybody else has to say in his roundup.

The liquid is gone. Bits of paper and vivid memories remain.

As much affection as I have for table tent from Bell’s Brewery that reads “Pierces your tongue without the nasty metal taste” and sits on a bookcase in the corner it doesn’t soothe my soul like the coaster pictured below. Make no mistake, we love Bell’s beers and during our grand adventure they let us camp in the brewery parking lot. But the table tents (the other reads, “Not tested on animals. Probably because we get so many volunteers.) are not connected to a specific memory.

This one is. The photo first appeared “Where in the Beer World?” nearly three years ago, and you’ll find the basic story there. It was taken during a memorable evening with Evan Rail that included several stops. This was the special one, and we might have lingered longer. However, when the conversation in Russian behind us started to get louder Evan suggested it was time to move on. “I think they might be in the mob,” he said.

Anyway, we’ve still got the coaster.

We don’t really collect coasters. We grab them along the way, toss them in a drawer, use them, weed them out from time to time. It would be even more dangerous to collect bottles (and the labels), so the rule is “new one in, old one out.” The only permanent fixture is the empty bottle of Thomas Hardy’s Ale from 1968.

I wrote about opening the bottle here and here. It was produced at the Eldridge Pope Brewery, which is connected to still more memories for us.

I’ve already taken a look at the roundup (growing as I write) and some of the artwork is wonderful.

For instance, the new labels Left Hand Brewing introduced in 2010 are flat out stunning. But we’re not ready to throw out our old-style Left Hand coaster. Got it at Mike O’Shay’s Restaurant in Longmont.

But that’s another story.

Deep into a discussion at A Good Beer Blog that has a bit of everything — cyclical malaise, math, hop breeding, Stephen Beaumont, blog comment of the year from Bailey — host Alan McLeod added another topic.

(Editor’s note: A Good Beer Blog moved since this was written, so the links don’t work but the post and comments have been archived by Wayback Machine. Or you can visit the post in its new home.)

I still don’t believe in beer community. Not one person has shown up to help me move the furniture. Pity the person who confuses people who sell you stuff for their best friends.

I commented that perhaps he should give that thought a thread of its own (before I did). He replied, “You start it and, in response, I will both bolster the point and yet confuse it with other tangential baggage that makes it lose its way.”

At the time I was reading a post by Rob Fullmer’s at Beer PHXation about the Phoenix beer blogging community, which obviously includes a discussion of the local beer community and why “our beer culture seems incomplete and disconnected.” At the end he writes, “Let’s build a community.”

So a few thoughts and/or questions jump out:

– Is Alan serious?

– Do people consciously build beer-centric communities or does beer end up playing a larger role in an already existing community?

– Do the beer communities of Asheville, N.C., and Bamberg, Germany, overlap or exist in separate spheres?

– Are brewers (or breweries) and beer enthusiasts part of the same beer community?

– Are brewers (or breweries) and beer enthusiasts part of the same community? My answer to that one is brewery owners need to understand how important that is. At least at the basic community level, that being the one in which show up to help move the furniture is part of the discussion.

Today at Grantland, Michael Kruse examines how those wild and wacky uniforms have helped turn the University of Oregon into a national college football power.

. . . the head of a think tank and a visiting scholar at Berkeley’s Center for Research on Social Change gave a wonky talk at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. “We are headed,” Michael H. Goldhaber said, “into what I call the attention economy.”

Economics is the study of the allocation of resources that are scarce. These days, more and more, information isn’t scarce. Stuff isn’t scarce. What’s scarce is attention. The companies that win in an attention economy are those that win the eyeballs of people who have too much to look at. Too many ads. Too many screens in too many places. Too many games on too many channels on too many days of the week.

“This new economy,” Goldhaber said in Cambridge in January 1997, “is based on endless originality.

“If you have enough attention,” he added, “you can get anything you want.”

The uniforms got the attention of talented high school football players from across the nation. That’s where the story begins and ends, but there are other things to consider along the way. These are relative to beers that are different; weird, wacky, extreme if you like, but maybe only as different a pumpkin beers.

At times this might be a little unsettling.

“If attention is now at the center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style,” UCLA professor Richard Lanham wrote in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. “It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance trade places.

“Push style to the extreme,” Lanham wrote, “and it becomes substance.”

I can’t decide if this sounds like an endorsement for extreme beer or an Onion headline.

I’m not sure if “A Practical Treatise on Brewing, and on Storing of Beer; Deduced from Forty Years Experience” by William Black, published in London in 1835 will make the bibliography for “For the Love of Hops,” so I am passing along this little story now.

It comes from a short chapter called, “The Flavour of London Porter.”

No single house can imitate the different flavours of all the great London establishments; but the flavour of any particular house can be easily acquired. By the way, talking of flavours, I must take the liberty of relating an anecdote which is said to have occurred during the last century.

A Dutch house was at that time in the practice of getting whole gyles of porter brewed on purpose for them by one of the great houses of London. On one occasion one of their clerks was in London at the time of brewing, and went to see the process. He unfortunately, poor fellow! tumbled into a copper of boiling worts, and before he could be got out again was actually boiled to death. The gyle of beer was sent to Holland, and turned out to be very good.

The next batch sent, however, did not turn out so well, and the Dutch house complained of it, saying it had not the same flavour as the preceding gyle. The answer returned by the London house was, that they had no means of giving them precisely the same flavour, unless they would send them over another Dutchman. So much for flavour.

How can Dutch Porter not be a recognized style?

Sales of IPA (known as India Pale Ale in some parts, but quite often simply called I-P-A) in the United States surpassed those of Pale Ale for the first time this year, according Symphony IRI.

The data is primarily for packaged goods sold in supermarkets, convenience stores and big box stores but there’s no reason to believe it would be different if you tossed in, say, beer sold on draft in pubs and bars. Officially, “seasonal” is the No. 1 craft beer style, but that’s another discussion.

In his “Craft Brewing & Mid-Year Category Sales Review” Dan Wandel of Symphony IRI told Brewers Association members that IPA sales increased 39 percent in the first half of the year, continuing an ongoing trend that moved it past Pale Ale. He also said that IRI now tracks 253 IPA brands, up 76 in the last six months.

As well as reporting the basic facts (craft beer dollar sales increased 14.3 percent in the first six months, but sales of Blue Moon and Shock Top beers are growing even faster) Waddell took a look at what else beer drinkers buy when they go shopping for their favorite brands.

When craft beers are in a shopping basket there’s a good chance that imported wine will be. Products such as natural cheese, fresh cut salad, yogurt, orange juice and canned tomatoes also index highly. When other beer is in the basket there’s a much higher chance cigarettes, processed cheese slices and frozen pizza will be.

And we wonder how stereotypes get formed.