musing

The Big Four of Big Beer worldwide — Anheuser-Busch InBev, SABMiller, Carlsberg and Heineken — sell 50 percent of the beer. As recently as the 1990s they had only a 20 share.

But here’s the really interesting number, which Benj Steinman of Craft Beers News/BMI provided during the craft brewery conference: They earn 77 percent of the profit.

He pointed out that the United States “profit pool” is the largest in the world and still expanding, expected to grow $3 billion in the next three years, mostly because of cost savings at A-B InBev and MillerCoors. In contrast, he said that because of the intense fixed costs involved in expansion that “craft breweries” probably earn just 3 percent of the profit pool despite selling 5 percent of the beer.

Some links to take your mind off that curious business reality:

Michael Jackson would have been 69 years old Sunday.

A good day to pull one of his books — I always recommend Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion — off the shelf. Read aloud if you like.

Also, there are new publications on both sides of the Atlantic that pay tribute to his legacy. In England, the Brewery History Society dedicated the current issue to “the most significant writer on beer there has been.”

In the United States, Jay Brooks wrote about Jackson’s influence in the latest Beer Connoisseur magazine. I haven’t actually seen this issue and can’t guarantee how easy it will be to find, but look for Jackson on the cover.

The Beer Society tribute gets an official launch at 6 p.m. Sunday at The Rake in London. Pete Brown, who wrote the introduction, contributor Mark Dredge, the editor and others will be on hand. And the magazine will be for sale. Brown’s introduction in online. Here’s the rest of the table of contents:

The World Guide to Beer – Jeff Evans
Michael Jackson and beer styles – Martyn Cornell
Michael Jackson and world beers – Tim Webb
The taste of beer – Zak Avery
Michael Jackson and beer writing – Roger Protz
Michael Jackson: Father of the craft brewing renaissance in America – Carolyn Smagalski
On the road with the Beer Hunter – J.R. Richards
Michael Jackson: the personal view of a brewer – John Keeling
Beer writing and new media – Mark Dredge

And a quick heads up. Richards is the filmmaker who trailed Jackson through much of Europe and the United States during the last years before Jackson died in 2007. He is working to complete his documentary — “Beer Hunter: The Movie” — and seeking donations. Here are the basics:

Your donation will also help establish the “Pints for Parkinson’s Foundation,” aimed at preserving Michael’s legacy while raising money and awareness for the Parkinson’s Foundation. As a sponsor, your name will appear on the credits of the Beer Hunter movie and you’ll receive a free download of the film after its release.

A suggested donation would be $10.

Surely you are familiar with Beer Madness at the The Washington Post. If not, read this.

Basically, beer fans get to vote between two beers — for instance, right now you can pick Breckenridge Vanilla Porter or Duck-Rabbit Milk Stout — a panel of eleven has tasted blind. Then the paper reveals the results and another round commences based on the beers the panelists favor.

Had I not been traveling Oregon’s sometimes snow-covered roads* in order to learn the mysteries of hop genetics, quality pelletizing and other information that belongs in a book about hops I would have liked to have handicapped the tournament.

* The road got more exciting after I took the picture at the top. Eventually I came to flashing lights that demanded vehicles have chains or traction tires. My travel tip to you is: visit hop country when hops are growing.

Well, maybe not the whole thing. But I’d just read one of way too many analyses about how to win your office March Madness pool; this one based on find value. The example was Texas, which was undervalued (correctly, it seems) since a respected numbers guy gave Texas something like a 5 percent chance to win the tournament and at that moment more like 3 percent of people entering some online mega-pool picked Texas.

You’ll have to trust me on this, but I was going to suggest that Great Divide Claymore Scotch Ale offered similar value. At the time, Founders Dirty Bastard was already burying Claymore, which is such a beautifully balanced beer I feel compelled to comment on how that balance and finesse is what seems to set Great Divide’s beer apart every time I drink one. In fact, Dirty Bastard won the popularity contest, 1,017-351. The panelists preferred Claymore.

I’m not really that brilliant, but you knew that. Because I had a 50 percent chance to be right. This contest is a random walk through better beer land. That’s not a bad thing. I love Edmund Fitzgerald Porter &#151 one of these days the T-shirt I bought in 1993 is simply going to fall apart — but it received more than 70 percent of votes from fans. The panelists preferred it over Hoppin’ Frog Silk Porter by a 6-5 vote, which probably better represents the difference between two.

Personal preference is good, and the contest is fun. But I’m not sure it is different than flipping a coin. In the first round, the panelists and crowd agreed sixteen times. They disagreed fifteen times (Anchor Old Foghorn and Weyerbacher Blithering Idiot tied at 512 — or 32 pints apiece — in the popularity contest. It doesn’t get more random that that.

My value bet for this round? How about Smuttynose Finest Kind Finestkind IPA? A 1,228-357 underdog to Bell’s Two-Hearted it captured eight of the eleven panelists’ palates. Now it is running way behind Lagunitas Maximus.

(And speaking of fans, check out how many votes have been lodged in the showdown between Evolution Rise Up Stout and Port City Porter.)

Jay 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.

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.

Since 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 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.