The meme stops here – but for Jay . . .

The scary part is the little girl in the photo could be somebody's grandmother by todayJay tagged me, but I must — as in all things — blame Alan.

The background: Dave Turley tagged Jay Brooks in the “7 Things You May Not Know About Me” meme. He bit. Now I’m supposed to tell you seven things you don’t know about me and then tag fifteen other people. Well, so far I’ve thought of three things about me, two of which are the true, so because I like Jay I’ll break my personal “no memes” rule and push ahead.

But, in part because Jay already tagged most the people I’m willing to be mean too I’m choosing just one. Joe Rhodes, Mr. Trapipsahton, because why ask the question unless you are prepared for answers that will truly revolt you?

SEVEN THINGS

1. I have thrown up in every state in the country.

2. My name is spelled H-I-E-R-O-N-Y-M-U-S, a fact which has escaped too many magazine editors and people who write me checks.

3. My first pet’s name was “Bones.” Oops, I think I just gave you access to my bank account.

4. I invented the Internet. My uncle was a senior author of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (you old enough to remember that annual ritual?).

5. I’m pretty sure I’ve see “Two for the Road” more than any other movie, but I’ve never sat through “Forrest Gump.”

6. I am Santa Claus.

7. We are moving to St. Louis. Perhaps I should have posted this on Facebook seven months ago, but I didn’t get around to it.

Let’s hope Joe gets back to us.

Blues & beers at the crossroads

Cemetery at historic Robert Johnson crossroads (or not)

beernews.org reports that Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Sony Legacy are set to collaborate on another beer/music project, this time turning to the blues.

In mid-January, Sony Music Entertainment filed a trademark application for Robert Johnson’s Hellhound on my Ale. The name is a play on words from one of Johnson’s songs, Hellhound on my Trail. This week, Dogfish got TTB approval for a keg collar. The only description available is that it’s brewed with lemons.

Enough about beer. On to Robert Johnson. Here’s what Sony Legacy wants you to know about him: “May 8, 2011, marks the 100th birthday of Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, who, according to legend, sold his soul down at the crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in a midnight bargain that has haunted the music world for three-quarters of a century. The ‘deal’ brought forth Johnson’s incandescent guitar technique and a run of 10-inch 78 rpm singles for the Vocalion, Oriole, Conqueror and Perfect labels recorded in San Antonio in 1936 and Dallas in 1937.” Sony then gets to the point. It’s selling two special Robert Johnson sets.

One of many possible Robert Johnson crossroadsSince we’re pretty sure that Johnson didn’t actually enter in a transaction with the devil it might seem silly to worry about the location of THE crossroads themselves, but humor me. It wasn’t necessarily, or even probably, where Highway 61 and Highway 49 meet.

More than twenty years ago Living Blues magazine devoted pretty much an entire issue to “The death of Robert Johnson.” Jim O’Neal set the tone with his introduction.

As marvelous and influential as Robert Johnson was, his life, lyrics, and legend have still received an inordinate amount of attention over the past 20 or 30 years. The mythic proportions of the Johnson legend are largely the product of modern-day audiences’ and writers’ enthusiasm (further fueled by this issue of Living Blues, of course). The search for anything of substance pertaining to Johnson has produced a valuable body of research, but it has also created more and more pitfalls where fiction may bury the facts.

Almost every blues artist of Johnson’s generation who has been interviewed has probably been asked about Robert Johnson (sometimes ad nauseam), and who knows how many times one bluesman or another has fabricated a tale merely to prey on a young interviewer’s anthusiams and keep his attention a little longer.

Honeyboy EdwardsHoneyboy Edwards, who’ll be 96 years old in June, tells a convincing story in that 1990 Living Blues about playing with Johnson the night he was poisoned. By a bit of chance we heard him repeat it in 1992 at a Clarksdale, Mississippi, lunch spot called Fair’s. He was in town to enjoy the Sunflower Blues Festival. The week before he performed at the first — there might have one or two more — Robert Johnson Crossroads Festival in nearby Greenwood (the photo on the right). Anyway, if I were in charge of organizing a Robert Johnson commemorative beer I’d invite Honeyboy to toss in a few hops.

To return to beer for a moment, apparently they wouldn’t want to call this new one Crossroads because Anheuser-Busch briefly tested a wheat beer by that name in 1995. Flunked the test; guess there was no deal with the devil.

Back to Robert Johnson. We made two trips into the Mississippi Delta in 1992, because Daria was writing a story for Touring America called “Where the Blues Began.” We used Living Blues to help us find historically important spots. O’Neal wrote an article called “A Traveler’s Guides to the Crossroads” that even had maps, and was still properly skeptical.

I have never heard any musician claim to have made any deal at any crossroads, by the way, although some say they have heard such stories told by old-timers. But Napoloan Strickland of Como, Mississippi, did tell me that, following instructions from his grandfather, he learned to play music by going to a cemetery and ‘straddling a grave” at midnight.

One of the crossroads mentioned was near Bonnie Blue Plantation, where Johnson lived, and White Cemetery. We headed there near dark, per O’Neal’s suggestion. I’m not sure we actually found the right cemetery, but we did spy three crosses, shined the car headlights on them and I took the photo at the top. The experience became the lead to Daria’s story.

“You’re standing in a tiny cemetery that’s surrounded by a cotton field. The few stark white crosses rise from the grass like ghosts. Across the dirt road in one direction is a field of tall corn, in the other, a field of sorghum. It’s growing dark, and you realize that if you screamed your loudest, no one would come.

“This could be the place, you think — the crossroads where blues musician Robert Johnson claimed he met the Devil. Here, the idea doesn’t seem so far fetched. You can easily imagine a thin young man with a guitar slung over his shoulder making his way down the road, and a dark stranger appearing suddenly from out of the corn.”

It’s going to take a spectacular beer to stand up to that memory.

Is that a beer fault? Or intentional choice?

Rather than languishing as the 22nd comment on the previous post this question from Tom seems worth making a new post.

There seems to be a conflation between intentionality and fault running through a good portion of the comments here. My question: if AB continually produces a beer with a particular flavor profile, with components that are marked as a fault by certain drinkers but not by others, doesn’t that point to a certain level of intentionality on AB’s part that makes that fault not so much a fault but an intentional choice by the brewery? Sure, some people may or may not like it, but to call something a fault would imply the brewer didn’t intend it to be in the beer. And I’m guessing AB wants that flavor in their beer. Whether we as drinkers like it or not. A rough similar analogy would be with diacetyl/butter flavors in British beers–there seems to be a lot more tolerance for this as a flavor component of beer in England than in the United States. Thoughts?

Not to rehash the analytic versus hedonistic argument of last week but acetaldehyde hardly seems to be what provokes such vitriol toward Budweiser and its brethren at the beer ratings sites.

Just for the heck of it I took a quick look at the Budweiser ratings at Rate Beer. (As a quick aside, seems curious that Bud had been rated 2,994 times, while the “impossible to get” Westvleteren 12 a comparatively high 1,886 times.)

No mention of green apple, grassy aroma or flavor or acetic (vinegar) character, all attributes of acetaldehyde.

Anyway, Tom asks a good question.

Will blogs go the way of Miller Chill?

Stuff recently noticed, perhaps because a press release headed my way or I was goofing off.

  • Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter (NY Times) – No mention of beer or wine or cucumber blogs, but this gets my obligatory bit of navel gazing out of the way early this week.
  • Saint Arnold Brewing had made Saint Arnold Farmer Brown’s Ale the third release in its “Movable Yeast” series: Saint Arnold Farmer Brown’s Ale. It is an alternate version of Saint Arnold Brown Ale made with saison yeast. A limited supply of 60 barrels of Saint Arnold Farmer Brown’s Ale is being released today and will be available on tap at the brewery (for weekday tours only) and at select bars and restaurants throughout Texas. This release was created by brewing a regular batch of Saint Arnold Brown Ale and splitting the wort into two 60 barrel fermenters. One fermenter was pitched with the usual Saint Arnold yeast to make Saint Arnold Brown Ale and the second fermenter was pitched with saison yeast to create Saint Arnold Farmer Brown’s Ale. (From a press release)
  • More love for the Cicerone program (NY Times) – A headline that reads “A Quest to Add Sophistication to Beer’s Appeal” only scares me a little bit. Impressive fact: 3,500 people have passed the beer server exam, which means there are more Cicerones of some rank than there are active BJCP judges . . . and the number of Cicerones is growing much faster. I would have put this story at the top, but I didn’t want Ray Daniels’ head to get any bigger.
  • Summit Brewing in St. Paul, Minn., is swtiching from twist-off caps to pry-off caps. Pry-off caps offer a much tighter seal to prevent oxygen from entering the bottle, which means beer may stay fresher longer. A subject I’m not done ragging about. (From a press release)
  • “It’s the coolest thing, the beer business.” “It’s the coolest industry on the planet. Doesn’t everybody want to be in the beer business?” Love that quote from John Stroh III. On Feb. 8, 1985, Detroit’s Stroh Brewing Co. announced it was closing its brewery after 135 years. At the time, it was the third-largest beermaker in the U.S., with a capacity of 7 million barrels. That was just seven months after Larry Bell sold his first beer, made in a 15-gallon soup pot at his small brewery in Kalamazoo. The story is part of a package at Mlive.com about Michigan’s “beer boom.”