musing

This is the press release the Spoetzl Brewery sent out to announce the release of Shiner 101, its newest beer:

The release suggests heading here for more information, mostly a video of Spoetzl brewmaster Jimmy Mauric talking about beer in Czech. At least I think it’s beer. He could be describing his pet poodle for all I know.

Is that really Jimmy Mauric talking? If you look closely you’ll likely conclude not, but that doesn’t matter. How closely might Shiner 101 replicate a “Czech-style” beer? I’m looking forward to finding out, but again that won’t be the point of the beer.

You can be darn sure it will be a beer of the region. Shiner’s Czech heritage is real. From the Czech Heritage Society of Texas:

The town was originally called New Half Moon but changed to Shiner in 1888. Czech and German immigrants were induced to settle in the area in the 1870s by Henry B. Shiner through his sale of cheap farmland. The prairie around Shiner was fertile and ideal for growing cotton. The Shiner Brethren Church was organized November 8, 1881. A cemetery is located adjacent to the Church. SS. Cyril & Methodius Catholic Church was built in 1891. St. Ludmila’s Academy Catholic School was opened in 1897. The Spoetzl Brewery, which still operates today, was originally built in the early 1900s by the Shiner Brewing Association, a stock company of local men.

Mauric grew up in Shiner, playing on the brewery grounds when he was a kid. He started working in the bottle shop when he was 17, walking a mile and a half to work. He since bought the homestead where he grew up. When the wind blows from the south he sits on his porch and smells fresh wort (usually destined to become Shiner Bock, which accounts for 87 percent of production).

He was always good at fixing things and worked his way up at Spoetzl, becoming assistant brewmaster in 1991 and brewmaster in 2005. Spoetzel sent him to the Siebel Institute of Technology to master brewing. When he was in his 30s he attended an area junior college to learn more about computers and technology. This June he will have worked at the brewery for 32 years.

These days Shiner advertising makes a big deal out of the fact that “Every drop of Shiner is brewed in Shiner.” Mauric certainly believes where is in ingredient in the beer.

“You can duplicate the water chemically, but it’s like a seasoned pot: Most people have a favorite frying pan that just makes everything taste better,” he says. “I don’t think you could copy the flavor from our brewing kettles.”

And there’s the town itself, with a population of little more than 2,000, a place you’d likely never know about were it not for beer. Gonzalez, 20 miles to the west, is five times larger. Have you ever heard of it? In that case you are probably a barbecue savant and answered, “Sure, Gonzalez Food Market.”

“The pride in the beer has always been here,” Mauric says. “Good times. Bad times. How people related to Shiner was the beer.”

I type Andy Tveekrem is headed home and you know the city.

Drum roll, please. The link to the news that includes the answer. It’ll be a new brewery. One of the owners was backpacking in Thailand when he learned Tveekrem would be available and immediately e-mailed his partners. Amazing what happens when you can get wi-fi in Bangkok.

Bonus points if know where Bill Morgan (formerly brewer at the former Diamondback Brewing in the same city) might be.

If you don’t already think that Conan O’Brien can be brilliant go back and watch Season 4 of The Simpsons. He was the producer for some of the very best episodes. But perhaps the Simpsons aren’t for you . . . and perhaps you’re still pissed off at O’Brien because he twice seemed less than cordial to Michael Jackson when Jackson appeared on his show (here’s Jackson’s account of the first).

But let’s agree that O’Brien is a popular niche product. So are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but they’ve earned a spot in our culture at least equal to “microbrews.” I didn’t have a beer in hand the other day read David Carr’s analysis in The New York Times the mess NBC has made of “The Tonight Show” franchise, but I might have had my beer goggles on.

In the old paradigm, networks operated from Olympian heights, but with cable outlets multiplying, a network’s size and mass audience are not always an advantage. While cable networks can pick and choose their spots, building discrete successes while living off a combination of fees and advertising, broadcast networks are at the top of a huge ecosystem where their every move lands forcefully on affiliated locals.

In a country this size a niche can be pretty big. Big enough that large companies, some of them breweries, will start to covet that share. They need to be careful how they go after it.

The message to the younger talent is one thing — wait for a turn that may never come or may be taken back at any second — but the message to younger audiences is even clearer: a legacy industry will default to legacy assets and ride them down to the bitter end . . . .

Twitter nation was livid, of course. “Nice work NBC. Take out the only late night host my age range and younger will even consider watching,” said @MatthewJBrown, Tweeting the sentiments of many.

Based on the times Jackson appeared on O’Brien’s show it seems he might not understand this analogy:

He clearly isn’t Miller Lite. He might not be Blue Moon White or Samuel Adams Boston Lager. But he’s bigger and more real than Duff.

Beer for Chicks has posted the round up for Session #35: New Beer’s Resolutions, a combination of 2009 highlights, occasional lowlights and actual resolutions . . . and already it is time to think about Session #36 on Feb. 5.

Because host Tom Cizauskas expects us to take it seriously. The topic: Cask-conditioned ale.

Above all, let’s have perspective folks, perspective! Cask-conditioned ale is not a matter of life and death; it’s much more.

He means it. There will be no showing up for class Feb. 5 and telling the teacher you couldn’t come up with an idea related to the topic because he’s supplied a long list of potential topics: make it about lifestyle, culture, ale vs. lager, saison (really!). . . “Make it a sad story. Make it a love story.”

Did I mention my first beer of 2010 was cask-conditioned Big Sky IPA Papago Brewing in Scottsdale? If you’d told me in 1996 at the first Real Ale Festival in Chicago that 13-plus years later I’d be sitting in a bar in Arizona drinking a cask-conditioned beer from Montana (you might know Big Sky Brewing better for Moose Drool) I’d have suggested that chances were better somebody would invent something called Facebook, where festival cellarmaster Steve Hamburg and I would be friends.

This is going to be fun.

Questions to consider on a Monday morning: Is there life after beer blogging? What trend did Rock Art Brewery set?