How do you compare a pils to an imperial stout?

Which 90-plus beer should I drink tonight?

I have not so much made peace with “best” lists as run out of new ways to say why I don’t care for those that don’t provide sensible context. Thus when the latest lists from Rate Beer and Beer Advocate (in its print edition) arrived I sat silent.

Sure, I was amused reading the conversations that followed Martyn Cornell’s “Why extremophiles are a danger to us all” — both the comments on his blog and posts (such as this one) it inspired — but I didn’t have anything to add.

However, by taking a sledgehammer to college rankings in the current New Yorker magazine Malcolm Gladwell provoked a thought.

Gladwell begins his assault by examining the way Car & Driver ranks automobiles, writing the magazine’s “ambition to grade every car in the world according to the same methodology would be fine if it limited itself to a single dimension.” And, “A heterogeneous ranking systems works fine if it focuses just on, say, how much fun as car is to drive.”

Which leads to what the essay’s really about, rating colleges.

A ranking can be heterogeneous, in other words, as long as it doesn’t try to be too comprehensive. And it can be comprehensive as long as it doesn’t try to measure things that are heterogeneous. But it’s an act of real audacity when a ranking system tries to be comprehensive and heterogeneous — which is the first thing to keep in mind in any consideration of U.S. News & World Report’s annual “Best Colleges” guide.

This is not to say that Rate Beer uses the same methodology to compile its lists as U.S. News does for colleges. But it does endeavor to be comprehensive and heterogeneous (even though the top of the list is dominated by homogeneous, i.e. imperial, beers).

And therefore we are left with rankings that imply we might compare an imperial pumpkin beer to an elegant, well-balanced, low-alcohol cucumber beer. Could we would then use this as a guide when choosing a beer? Doesn’t work, does it?

(In all fairness to the beer rating sites they also group beers “by style,” making some homogeneous comparisons possible.)

Anyway, while I was reading Gladwell’s article — which delves into the subjectivity involved in setting “objective” standards — Pandora managed to feed me song after song that I didn’t feel the need to skip. It’s been a while since The New York Times explained how “The Music Genome Project” works, but it’s still a fascinating story. And one you may hear repeated in the coming months, because Pandora has filed for a $100 million IPO.

Some elements that these musicologists (who, really, are musicians with day jobs) codify are technical, like beats per minute, or the presence of parallel octaves or block chords. Someone taking apart Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” documents the prevalence of harmony, chordal patterning, swung 16ths and the like. But their analysis goes beyond such objectively observable metrics. To what extent, on a scale of 1 to 5, does melody dominate the composition of “Hey Jude”? How “joyful” are the lyrics? How much does the music reflect a gospel influence? And how “busy” is Stan Getz’s solo in his recording of “These Foolish Things”? How emotional? How “motion-inducing”? On the continuum of accessible to avant-garde, where does this particular Getz recording fall?

There are more questions for every voice, every instrument, every intrinsic element of the music. And there are always answers, specific numerical ones. It can take 20 minutes to amass the data for a single tune. This has been done for more than 700,000 songs, by 80,000 artists. “The Music Genome Project,” as this undertaking is called, is the back end of Pandora. [Note: The article is from 2009 and those numbers have grown.]

Would it be possible to do something similar for beer? I’m guessing homogeneous would work better than heterogeneous — there’s a reason that Frank Sinatra songs never show up on my Chris Knight station — and finding volunteers for research would be easy.

George Orwell’s favorite (favourite) pub

Back in November I linked to an essay from George Orwell about picking hops. Now Charles in Canada has added an article Orwell wrote about his favorite pub, Moon Under Water.

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its “atmosphere.”

And then there was the Dallas brewpub by the same name. If you blinked in 1996 you missed it. As I recall, it took more than a million dollars to open and caused quite a stir. It closed in, what?, about a month. In a state known for brewpub failures this was probably the most grand.

Reviewing Moon Under Water, the Dallas Observer offered commentary that seemingly haunts Texas brewpubs 15 years later: “Brewpubs are kind of like West Texas cows: It takes a lot of acreage to support even one.”

Which beer is not like the others (III)?

This might have been more fun the first time than the second, but that won’t keep me from asking again. (However, I do promise not to roll out a quiz on St. Patrick’s Day, the next official beer drinking holiday.)

The goal is to identify the outlier and explain why it doesn’t belong on the list. There may be more than one answer, although I happen to have a specific one in mind.

a) Rogue Chocolate Stout
b) Foothills Brewing Sexual Chocolate
c) Meantime Brewing Chocolate
d) Dieu Du Ciel Aphrodisiaque
e) Boulevard Smokestack Chocolate Ale

What would Elvis drink?

Before I stick my nose back into academic papers focused on terpenoids, sesquiterpenoids and preserving hop aroma and flavor . . . a few things I’ve been reading.

* The New York Times reports full-service gyms are losing members. “In the 70s, they came for community. Now they come in and disassociate themselves from everyone in the club. It’s killing the health club,” says a marketing consultant. A sign that “third places” revolve around community rather than design.

* Excellent observations (if “grim reading”) in Tandleman’s Beer Blog about dwindling beer sales and number of pubs in Great Britain.

Society is changing in ways we could never have predicted. The web, social networking, time shifting multi channel TV, more comfortable homes, price, health awareness, recession, job insecurity, generational attitude shifts and more, dictate that a pub will never again be on every street corner, bursting at the seams and the only place to go for an entertaining interlude.

And:

There’s a mountain to climb. Nonetheless, the pub trade still refuses as a whole to face up to this and the fact that to attract customers and keep them, it has to be better. It has to offer a smile, a warm welcome (that just means a “hello” or a “thanks”), good surroundings, decent food and an experience that is attractive and competitive against other offerings. It has to offer good service and a wide range of beers that people actually want to drink, rather than the ones they can buy cheaply and sell dear.

Natty Bo at Nacho Mamas* Draft National Bohemian beer is returning to the Baltimore area. To the rest of the country this is like the return of PBR. For those of you thinking huh? . . . Natty Bo was a long time Baltimore fixture, with a history that pre-dates Prohibition. Carling bought the brewery in 1975, then Heileman acquired it, then Pabst. Today MillerCoors brews Natty Bo for Pabst.

Fact is that when we are next in Baltimore we’ll likely be drinking something brewed in Maryland and more expensive than Natty Bo. However, while I can’t tell you the last one of those better tasting beers I had when we last visited Charm City a while back I do remember where I was sitting when I last had a Natty Bo . . . almost 10 years ago.

We were in Nancho Mamas, one of the few places you could still find Natty Bo in bottles inn 2001 (and you drank it straight from bottle). Friends of ours took us there, because they understood we had to see a place where every available inch is covered with a picture of Elvis Presley or a photo from old Baltimore (mostly sports) or a piece National Bohemian memorabilia. These included signs large and small, a gallery of bottle caps on the wall at the front entrance, buckets hanging at the bar and more.

Lots of tourists, and lots of regulars (many with tourists in tow). These days reviews at Yelp mostly talk about the nachos and margaritas, but indicate in passing the decor remains intact. I hope the regulars are as well. Beer, communities, pubs (or bars) — they all make each other better. And a little Elvis on the side is OK.