musing

Chippewa Falls, Wis., is a town with about 13,000 residents. Drive in from the north, taking County Highway S to county Highway Q, turning south and driving past a couple of big parks and it doesn’t look that much different than Cameron on Bloomer or one of the other towns along U.S. 3. Maybe a little bigger.

Next, boom, a brewery complex, Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Co.

It’s a tourist attraction, for sure, and good for the town’s business. However it feels perfectly appropriate that the gift shop/museum may be new (much newer than other parts of the brewery) but is designed to look like a cabin from the nineteenth century and called Leinie Lodge.

Saturday Leinenkuegl’s hosted its eighth annual Leinie Lodge Family Reunion. Thousands attended. I expect many spoke with a distinctive northern Wisconsin/Minnesota accent (think Frances McDormand in “Fargo.”) And a PR person sent along this photo of Jake Leinenkugel autographing one attendee’s head.

You think it was staged? I don’t.

But I’m pretty sure that the man did not immediately tweet, “@jakeleinenkugel just signed my head. I may never wash it again.”

In the final minutes of “BEERTICKERS: Beyond the ale” documentary filmmaker Phil Parkin announces he still has some unfinished business.

When he began making this movie had no aspiration to be Morgan Spurlock (the protagonist in “Super Size Me”). “I never actually intended to be in the film,” he wrote in an email, “but became so ingrained in the content that I felt the viewer needed someone different, a non-ticker, to lead them through.” He set a goal to reach 500 ticks, and at the outset of the Sheffield Beer Festival he has 472.

Drinking No. 473 he talks about the lessons he has learned, but by No. 479 he is looking a little dazed as he wonders if friends who are to meet him will show up. And I’m thinking, “Dude, don’t do it.” Twenty-eight half pints (the “official” size for ticking as champion ticker Brian Moore explains at the beginning) amounts to about two gallons of beer even if you get a few short pours in there. This does not seem like a good idea.

In fact, his friends do arrive, it gets dark and the organizers call time after Parkin orders No. 492.

“Yes, I drank far too much that day, we arrived at 2 p.m. and I didn’t leave until around 12 or 1 a.m. if I remember correctly,” he wrote. “Much of that footage didn’t make the final cut. I drank far too much. Eek.”

The documentary started out to be an examination of beerticking, also known as scooping, a hobby he viewed as akin to trainspotting. It turned out to be about UK drinking culture, real ale and pubs. About a culture and people easy to care about. Maybe this makes me a hardass, but when Spurlock kept ordering to excess in “Super Size Me” I felt no empathy toward him.

When Parkin looked at his clock at 1:50 on morning and realized feeling like shit was part of the process my head also hurt. And who wouldn’t want to have a pint in a pub with Mick the Tick, listening to him play in a skiffle band in the pub where ticking may well have started?

British beer culture comes off all the better because this was not shot through a gaussian lens. Mick the Tick staggers a bit from time to time, and Dave Unpronounceable and Gazza (two of the other ticking principals) have a few rough edges.

Parkin gets a little rah-rah goofy when he visits the Thornbridge Brewery and helps brew a beer, but it works because by then he has begun to consider the difference between appreciation and accumulation. “I could have only one (beer). I wondered if it bothered the other beer tickers,” he comments before going on to the next tick.

In an email he reiterated that ticking doesn’t necessarily include keeping tasting notes, and for some “it’s all about the numbers. Quite sad in some cases as the appreciation of beer goes out of the window.”

Perhaps. But listening to Mick the Tick talk about beer I don’t really care if he can tell me if tick No. 24,612 tasted like fresh oranges on a June evening or brussel sprouts. As Parkin’s images illustrate so well, in the pub friendship, sharing and community are as important as the beer itself.

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You can find copies of “BEERTICKERS: Beyond the Ale” here and here.

Brian Yaeger asks if “consistency is the fifth ingredient in beer” (the first four being those specified in Germany’s beer purity law).

I find it easier to think about time as an ingredient. It adds to cost of production, and it influences the quality of the resulting beer, just like barley or hops. A beer that lagers six weeks occupies tank space that could have been used to produce three two-week lagers. Decoction makes a longer brew day. Beer properly bottle conditioning in a warm room is beer that could already by bringing in money were it otherwise carbonated.

In all fairness, Brian’s post is really intended to be more about the importance of consistency. There’s a New Beer Rule (#4: The god of beer is not consistency) about that, but he’s reminded me of the need for further discussion about the difference between quality control and blind devotion to “consistency.” That’s going to have to wait a couple of weeks, because there are comments from brewers somewhere in these boxes (or others) I want to include.

But a quick hint where I’ll be going. I’m far less bothered when a brewer changes the blend of hop varieties in a particular beer based on the quality of a particular crop than when he or she is dry hopping a beer and she or he doesn’t understand how that can affect diacetyl reduction. A little more or less marmalade on the nose this month is OK. A little more butter in the mouth is not.

Back to filling boxes.