German brewer’s in the medieval period brewed beer in its most pure form. German beer purity law of 1516 (Reinheitsgebot) prohibited use of any additives in beer. The only ingredients added in beer were malt (rice or barley), hops, yeast and water.
(I added the bold — the bad grammar and omission of the word Reinheitsgebot belongs to Buzzle.com.)
What macro brewer financed that research?
The list of preservatives in beer is not complete, but is already scary enough.
I appreciate moving pictures as much as the next person, so for both those who like to watch and those who like to read . . .
* Jack Curtin just posted something you should know about Sam Calagione.
* Laura Deibler sent along the YouTube video of her husband, Dan, singing a variation on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It speaks to the power of music, homebrewing and Trappist beer. Plus I really like the wink Dan gives Laura just over two minutes in.
* You think it was just chance that on the morning that Discovery channel debuted “Brew Masters” CBS Sunday Morning had a beer segment? The beer part, including Charlie Bamforth and Wynkoop Brewing, starts about four minutes in.
* Sorry, couldn’t figure out how to embed the next video. It’s from the Bloomberg The Mentor series. Jim Koch of Boston Beer provides advice to the guys from Oceanside Ale Works in Southern California. You gotta laugh when they say that Samuel Adams spills more beer than they brew in a year. At least if you are old enough to remember Jim Koch saying the same thing about Anheuser-Busch and his brewing company.
* I’m a sucker for any beer description that includes “It’s a cracker.” But throw in a Ry Cooder reference and you’re getting a link from me. Even if you are describing a Black IPA called Conqueror.
“If a beer is stale make sure it is always stale.”
That’s what Charlie Bamforth — a “beer professor” with too many credentials to list and author of the new Beer Is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing — told brewers yesterday during a conference call/online presentation for members of the Brewers Association.
Obviously, Bamforth was not advocating brewers sell stale beer — the seminar was titled, “Keep it Fresh: Understanding How Time, Temperature and Oxygen Impact Your Beer and What to Do About Them” — but he did give us something to think about.
His point was much like the lesson a German brewmaster taught Greg Zaccardi, founder of New Jersey’s High Point Brewing, in the mid-1990s.
“He said your beer can always be excellent or always be bad. It can’t go from excellent to bad to excellent,” Zaccardi remembers. “People will buy bad beer. They’ll get used to it.”
The beer menu at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque: Corona, Miller Lite, Tecate, Dos Equis, Marble (local brewery, both the India Pale Ale and the Wildflower Honey Wheat).
No local wine.
Alas, at intermission of “Bless Me, Ultima” last night most people seemed to be ordering wine or coffee.
As I wrote last week in posting the Wikio rankings, bloggers sure like to blog about blogging. Sure enough, madness followed back-to-back posts by Andy Crouch (shouldn’t it amuse us all if those vault him into the top spot next month?). Too many “why I blog” posts followed to link to.
I already wrote my mission statement five years ago, so I acted on the fact I had nothing new to say by saying nothing (it doesn’t always work that way.) Until I read a monstrously long John McPhee interview in the Paris Review.
Like maybe 10,000 words into it you have this exchange:
I suppose one of the hard things for a young writer is to learn that there’s no obvious path.
MCPHEE
There is no path. If you go to dental school, you’re a dentist when you’re done. For the young writer, it’s like seeing islands in a river and there’s all this stuff you can get into—where do you go? It can be a mistake to get too great a job at first; that can turn around and stultify you. At the age of, say, twenty-one, you’re in a very good position to make mistakes. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—each time the mistakes become a little more costly. You don’t want to be making these mistakes when you’re forty-five. But the thing is, in steering around all those islands, and finding currents to go around them, they’re all relevant.
Do you worry about outlets diminishing for writers?
MCPHEE
I’m really concerned about it. And nobody knows where it’s going—particularly in terms of the relationship of the Internet to the print media. But writing isn’t going to go away. There’s a big shake-up—the thing that comes to mind is that it’s like in a basketball game or a lacrosse game when the ball changes possession and the whole situation is unstable. But there’s a lot of opportunities in the unstable zone. We’re in that kind of zone with the Internet.
But it’s just unimaginable to me that writing itself would die out. OK, so where is it going to go? It’s a fluid force: it’ll come up through cracks, it’ll go around corners, it’ll pour down from the ceiling.
So two thoughts.
First, I wouldn’t say that Emily Sauter has things totally figured out, but head over to Pints and Panels to see her “beer reviews in sequential tradition,” otherwise known as cartoons. This weekend because I was clicking to read a variety of blogs I’ve never seen before because I was following the Beer Bloggers Conference on Twitter I was struck by how some blogs are a whole lot different, some not so much.
Pints and Panels, which I’ve been following since meeting Em at the Great American Beer Festival, falls into the former category. But that’s not the point. That Em and most other bloggers have more future than I do (geez, that looks dreary in black and white, but isn’t meant that way) doesn’t necessarily mean they see it more clearly than I (already feeling better), but they are going to be around for more of it (shoulders sag). And they are going to find different currents.
Second, the beer analogy (this is a beer blog, after all). You should already have it figured out, but one example. Only hours before Will Meyers of Cambridge Brewing brewed his first beer using a “sour mash” other small-batch brewers were telling him he was crazy, that he’d destroy his brewery. If you’ve ever tasted Cerise Cassée you’re glad he didn’t listen.