musing

A few links for your weekend beer reading pleasure:

– Shouldn’t stronger beers be sold in smaller bottles? I understand all the reasons why they aren’t, but Don Russell’s discourse on big beer bottles had me asking myself that question.

– You’ll want to put your thinking cap on before considering the questions Alan has, starting with What Is Actually The Enemy Of Good Beer? Give them some thought and leave him a comment.

– Nice that the Houston Chronicle wrote about Saint Arnold’s new downtown brewery. Nicer still that 51 people took the time to comment.

– When trends collide. Alexander D. Mitchell IV relays the news that a) the Baltimore Sun is retiring the “Kasper on Tap” beer blog because “did not attract a large enough audience to sustain it” and b) the Washington Post has made Greg Kitsock’s beer column a monthly status rather than biweekly feature.

Given the recent apparent success of Baltimore Beer Week and the fact that more newspapers around the country regularly feature beer stories this seems a little curious. In Texas, which has been as hard a place for small-scale breweries to get a foothold as anywhere, 51 readers comment on a story about Saint Arnold. In The D.C. area, an early bastion for better beer, the newspapers can’t figure out how to talk with beer drinkers. This is another reminder that newspapers are in disarray.

Pardon that the example of how this could work comes from the wine world — making it my second wine originated post in two days — because it’s very beer relevant.

Also, as Ed Carson pointed out with his comment about the rather dense posturing about the brain and wine that there’s a danger of violating New Beer Rules, Nos. 5 and 8, about taking beer too seriously. Fact is you don’t need to know the alcohol content or bitterness units (let alone the level of isoamyl acetate) in a beer to figure out if you like it, or to discuss it with friends.

Part one explains the premise:

There is a better way to review wine. It combines objective assessment with subjective preference in a compelling way, while providing story, context, and accountability. I’m talking scores out of 100, producer and regional story and commentary, double blind tasting, labs for insight and accountability, contextual pop-ups for technical and wine specific information, and beautiful creative commons photography. Pla-dow!

But you know what? No one will ever use such a system. Too risky. High potential for embarrassment. Too costly. Too time consuming. The list is endless.

Basically, double blind means the person (or people) doing the review would taste a beer without knowing anything about it. Not the brewery. Not what country it might be from. Not the style. Just look at the beer, taste the beer, evaluate the beer.

In Part 2 Pinotblogger provides an example of how it works. He starts with his score, the price of a bottle and a summary. Then he writes about the region where the wine was produced and the winery. Next more about his impression from the blind tasting. This is followed by the costly part that likely isn’t going to happen in wine or beer, and might actually be frivolous. That’s sending it to a lab and having it evaluated.

As you can see he got the grape variety wrong and it turned out the particular bottle at quality control issues. I think that makes it more educational.

What beer numbers would I like to see from a lab? The alcohol content and bitterness units for starters. My friend Derek Walsh, who lives in the Netherlands, provided those as well as original gravity, apparent attenuation, color and pH for many beers featured in Brew Like a Monk and Brewing With Wheat (February, Brewers Publications). He calls it a “strip search” and those numbers can tell you a lot.

Still more numbers related to quality control — like the level of dissolved oxygen or the amount of carbon dioxide — would also be interesting. But none of it is going to happen so I better get back to giving you the promised book reviews.

For further reading I suggest checking out the comments at Pinotblogger.

“Our brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that our prejudices feel like facts, our opinions indistinguishable from the actual sensation.”

This link goes to a discussion about wine and numbers and might remind you about previous discussions about the value of blind tastings. Nonetheless if you cross out wine and pencil in beer I think it still makes sense:

“we can’t quantify a wine beer by trying to listen to our tongue. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Donald Davidson argued, it is ultimately impossible to distinguish between a subjective contribution to knowledge that comes from our selves (what he calls our ‘scheme’) and an objective contribution that comes from the outside world (‘the content’). Instead, in Davidson’s influential epistemology, the ‘organizing system and something waiting to be organized’ are hopelessly interdependent. Without our subjectivity we could never decipher our sensations, and without our sensations we would have nothing to be subjective about. Before you can taste the wine beer you have to judge it.”

The next several days here will be all mostly about beer books. I’ve got a stack — some from last fall that I didn’t write about because we were out of the country — I should tell you about before the holiday shopping season arrives. In fact, with holiday beers about to arrive in stores I think I’ll start with Don Russell’s Christmas Beer tomorrow.

First a few thoughts provoked by Jeff Alworth, who begins his review of the most recent beer book to find its way on to the shelves at Barnes & Noble (but not our local Borders so far) this way:

There’s something a little cheeky about writing a world guide to beer. The act suggests hubris: that a person of modest age might really have attained the experience to put himself forth as an expert of the caliber to comment on all the world’s beers. That is the purview of another Brit, right? And herein is the second layer of hubris; in the post-Jackson age, who really has the cojones to step in and take his place? Well, apparently Ben McFarland has the cheek, because he’s put out a book called World’s Best Beers: One Thousand Craft Brews from Cask to Glass.

Alworth has nice things to say about the book but you might leave with the impression that McFarland is a youngster (“just his second book”) who saw the opportunity to market a book “familiar to those who know Michael Jackson’s oeuvre.” The thing is McFarland is 33, only two years younger than Jackson was when his second book, The World Guide to Beer, was published. He’s twice been chosen Britain’s Beer Writer of the Year, once when Jackson was on the judging panel.

So I dropped him a note with the straight-out loaded question: Do you view yourself stepping in to take Michael Jackson’s place?

He replied (this is the short version, because it seems people who write books have a lot to say):

“No. I don’t. In terms of beer writing, Michael Jackson had to carry his enormous cajones around in a wheelbarrow. They were THAT big. He was the original beer writer and the best. He inspired many to drink more beer and, indeed, write about it and for that reason, with so many exalting the joys of beer, there will never be another like him.

“Setting out in life with the ambition of becoming the next ‘someone else’ is an extremely daft thing to do. Whilst I often asked Jacko for advice and am forever thumbing his books, I don’t see myself picking up his professional wheelbarrow.”

Exactly. There will never be another like him. However we got two great beer books this year, Tasting Beer and Hops and Glory, that Jackson never would have written but certainly would have enjoyed.

Jackson was a journalist first, like McFarland is today. When you think about it writing a world guide in 1977, when beer information was a little harder to come by, was pretty dang cheeky. That he did is one of the reasons why it’s easier to find today.

Inspired, at least in part, by BrewDog’s Equity for Punks, Adrian-Tierney Jones has a half dozen questions for us this morning (a.m. in the U.S., that is):

I am talking about the sly sense of exclusiveness that is seeping through the world of craft beer. Do you want to be in my gang? Is it a good thing, has beer lost its democratic edge? Was its democratic edge just another manifestation of mindless rabble-rousing, the guy in the corner, drunk on god knows what, taking potshots at easy targets — drink Bud, Blue Ribbon, Stella, whatever?

“Is this what the craft brewing revolution has come to, a freemasonry of various lodges looking uneasily at each other, or will love of good beer overcome any drift towards tribalism? The love of elitism. And what of the wider world? Will commentators in the media (whatever branch) be overwhelmed by this sense of singularity in a world which is usually represented in their pages or on the screen by closing pubs, ‘oh look women drink beer’ featurettes, the very odd shrug on the rising star of cask beer and predictable points scored on the horrendous fashion sense of CAMRA members.

As beer becomes more exclusive, but more knowing, more distanced from its ur-source of a refreshing but uncomplicated drink, then it becomes more valuable, changes its character, at least in the minds of many of us — however, as this drive to exclusivity continues, I wonder if it might hinder its growth and its clubbiness put off people who like a beer but don’t consider it their life and deliver them into the arms of whatever drink offers them a alternative and less threatening sense of belonging (maybe beers that are the equivalent of those ads for ‘exclusive’ figurines of Native American warriors looking narky or kittens wearing high heels). A two-tier system of beer appreciation waits perhaps?

I didn’t plan to quote quite the much, but so many nice phrases. “. . . more exclusive, but more knowing.”