musing

Pilsner Urquell: 5 weeks does not equal 3 months

After touring the Pilsner Urquell brewery last November I promised that when I got a chance I’d take a look at Michael Jackson’s video report from 1989 (the Beer Hunter series) to compare what he saw then with what Pilsner Urquell says is how long they’ve “always” lagered beer.

Michael Jackson at Pilsner Urquell

I tell you, that’s one great half hour of video. Discovery really needs to reissue the three hours of video in DVD form (before our VCR dies). Incredible details about the wooden vessels the brewery was using, the coopering, the whole process. I love watching Jackson wander through the caves, and the Hitchcockian moment where a giant barrel appears to be stalking him. You get thirsty seeing him march around open wooden fermenters, then he climbs a ladder to loom over one and explain that this is one of the things that make Pilsner Urquell different, presumably better. He says that others in the industry have told the brewery it is crazy not to modernize but that its leaders swear they won’t abandon open fermentation. Sigh.

But back to the question at hand. These days Pilsner Urquell lagers its beers five weeks, claiming this is the same amount of time as when Josef Groll first brewed the beer in 1842. On the other hand, the Beer Hunter report in 1989? “Three months,” which on my calendar is one quarter of a year (13 weeks).

Is the beer local if the bottle isn’t?

Let’s say that you drink local beer because you think it is important to support locally produced products and further the environmentally correct thing to do.

So there’s every chance you expect the local brewery to use local products itself. But what if it is much cheaper for the contract mobile bottling company — which happens to be called “Green Bottling” — that packages the beer for the brewery to buy from China or Oklahoma than from a plant three miles away.

Kind of complicated, I know. You’ll find the discussion at the Oregon Economics Blog.

 

‘I am’ versus ‘Beer Wars’

OK, time to be cantankerous.

One heck of a lot of people in the beer blogging and twittering world have linked to the “I Am a Craft Brewer” video, including (in the interest of full disclosure) me.

Looks like love.

So who in the beer blogging world is going to slice and dice this puppy like they did Beer Wars?

 

Henry King and ‘institutional memory’

I’m doing my best not to get sucked back into the Beer Wars discussion. But I do want to point you to Harry Schuhmacher’s excellent “alternative view.” In it he mentions the late Henry King.

I first met King at Oldenburg Beer Camp in 1996 and was fascinated when he talked about “institutional memory.” Eight years later Jim Parker, then editor of New Brewer magazine, asked me to write a profile of King because — being perfectly honest — he was dying. A great assignment and a terrible one. King died in April of 2005.

Anyway, today I added “Henry King: Another king of beers” to the library. And I’m thinking again about the importance of institutional memory.

But not writing about Beer Wars, though I will suggest you read what Stephen Beaumont has to write about the idea “we’re all in this together.”

 

With apologies to Woody Guthrie

Where in the beer world?

But on the other side …. it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

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No Where in the Beer World? this week. I figured still another Texas brewery would be overkill.

But I did want to share this photo taken in Big Bend National Park. The sign caused us to pause for a moment. Then we remembered the road — which was just plain too nasty to continue on in the RV — led to hot springs. I’m sure lots of park visitors disregard the sign and “take a soak” with an alcoholic beverage in hand.