musing

And still another beer book suggestion

One more last beer gift suggestion, at least until I remember something else.

You can download Beer Lover’s Britain for £5.99. Jeff Evans includes all the vital information you’d expect but also address the questions you really want answers to.

Should there be a head on my pint? Is it in the right glass? Is it meant to taste like that? How much does a pint cost? How do I pay the bill? Can I join in the games? Am I allowed to drive after drinking? What can we eat? Can we bring the children in? Is smoking allowed? Can I expect table service? What time does the pub close? Can we stay at a pub? How do we get there?

I also discovered you can download his Book of Beer Knowledge, one of ten really good beer books I already recommended.

As long as I’m suggesting guide books (avoided in making the list above because of their specialized nature) I should mention Good Beer Guide Prague & the Czech Republic. There’s a chance we’ll make it back to the south of Germany and the Czech Republic sooner than later, so already committing this book and Trips! (South) to memory.

  • Congratulations to Gary Melenhorst and John Stephenson from Ontario’s Creemore Springs Brewery for winning the copy of the upcoming Brewing with Wheat I donated to Alan’s Good Beer Blog Yuletide Photo Contest. Clever that they won a book about wheat beer with a picture of a wheat beer truck. The book will be available at the end of February.
  • Stephen Beaumont has crowned a Beer Glass of the Year. No further comment.

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    A beer niche is a niche is a niche

    The United States was not exactly a beer drinking nation in 1810. According to American Breweries II per capita consumption amounted to less than one gallon per man, woman and child.

    The number grew to about 20 gallons shortly before Prohibition and amounts to 21-plus gallons today. Or roughly 81.6 liters, compared to 157 liters for the Czechs (Bavarians drink about the same amount).

    It depends a little bit on how you define craft beer, but if we throw Blue Moon White into the mix then per capita consumption of craft beer amounts to about one gallon.

    Two hundred years later.

     

    1.3 billion Chinese don’t care about American beer

    No matter how long I think about a story or how many times I might rewrite sections I know when I look at it in print that I’ll realize I could have or should have written some part more clearly.

    Case in point, an article in the current issue of All About Beer magazine headlined “Ameri-Brew.” AABM paid me for my words, so it’s fair enough that I not post all of them here. Very briefly, the “nut graph”:

  • In one of the last essays he wrote in 2007, the introduction to Beer: Eyewitness Companions, the late Michael Jackson argued that “tomorrow’s classics will evolve from a new breed of American brews that are categorized by their admirers as ‘Extreme Beers.’ These are the most intense-tasting beers ever produced anywhere in the world.”

    • The story deals with the implications of that argument. What I should have written better:

  • Call it the Americanization of world beer or simply globalization, but the international beer landscape is changing. Not everybody agrees if that’s good, but few dispute America is at the center.

    • A better choice of words would have been “America is at the center of this change” or “America is the lightning rod.”

    To be clear, America is not the center of the beer world. You can say there is no center of the beer world or you can say the spot you are drinking in right now is the center of the beer world. Same meaning.

    I don’t care if Budweiser does sell for about eight times more than local beers in China. Discerning drinkers around the world are not going to look to Americans to supply all their beer needs, or even to beers that imitate those Americans brew.

    Want an idea of what change looks like in a traditional brewing nation? Read Evan Rail’s recent article from the New York Times.

    What my story in All About Beer didn’t get to is what specific beers Jackson might have been talking about when he wrote “tomorrow’s classics.” Or put another way, consider this comment regarding Jackson’s 1982 list of 5-star beers: “Given the evolution in beer and beer styles, as well as the explosion in American Craft Brewing creativity, I wonder how his list would be different if he were around to do it again.”

    I’m not going to suggest I have an answer, but after a little more research I intend to post a few dots you can connect yourself.

     

    Monday beer reading: ale vs. beer

    Nothing like a few words about beer to jump start your brain on a Monday morning, right?

  • Short read, because this news is so 2005. CNN Money/Fortune just discovered Pabst is a hipster beer. If you do want to spend more time with “retro beer” I’d suggest the article Don Russell wrote last year.
  • Longer read, for which Martyn Cornell provides a “Beer geekery warning: if teasing apart the knotted and tangled threads of brewing history is your bag, stick with me for the next 2,500 words as we range over five centuries of malted liquors and watch meanings mutate.”

    • How long did ale and beer remain as separate brews? Most drinkers, I think, know that “ale” was originally the English name for an unhopped fermented malt drink, and beer was the name of the fermented malt drink flavoured with hops, a taste for which was brought to this country from the continental mainland about 1400.

    I’m not sure that most American drinkers do. Feel free to educate yourself.

     

    And just when I promised to play nice

    Now the Village Voice has a list, Our 10 Best Beers. Great fodder — they include a “plebian” list and a “connoisseur’s list” — but a promise is a promise so nothing snarky from me.

    Instead I’ll take it out on . . .

    An opener for screwcap wines. Did some wine drinker miss the memo? They’re screwcaps. Granted, there is a legitimate use for people with arthritis. But “keeping the romance alive?”

    Now back to be the nice guy who buys the next round and a link that should have you smiling right into Happy Hour.

    Pete Brown celebrates. As far as I am concerned this paragraph alone makes him worthy of Beer Writer of the Year:

    I fucking love beer. I love the taste and appreciation of it. I love the society and culture that surrounds it, and the way it influences society and culture more broadly. I love the history of it, and what that history tells us about ourselves. I love the way it’s an international standard, a universal signifier of unpretentious sociability. I love the fact that I’ve made scores of genuine new friends through it – many of whom I’ve yet to meet physically. I love the way it inspires and intoxicates me – both in a physiological sense and an intellectual one.

    But wait, there’s another.

    Today I’m going to write my final column of the year for the Publican and then I’m going to a beer festival and/or a bar and I’m going to exceed the recommended daily guidelines of alcohol unit intake. I’m going to get drunk. I’m going to get shitfaced, sozzled, pissed, bladdered, cunted, wankered, soused, and most of the other 1346 words for inebriation I’ve collected over the years. I’m going to have a good time doing it, and the people who are with me are going to have a good time too – a better time than they would if they stayed in and watched the telly. And when I come home with The Beer Widow and a few mates, I’m going to share with them a bottle of Bass Kings Ale, brewed in 1902, which cost me over a hundred quid, and I’m going to marvel at the miracle of beer all over again.

    The nice thing is this evening we’ll be drinking something local, maybe on cask, and it will be part of the same miracle.