musing

I had planned to muse on women and beer this morning — it seems like such a pleasant way to begin the week. But that’s going to have to wait.

We start with good news for the Beer Blogosphere: Roger Protz has started blogging. (Thanks to Jeff Bell for the heads up.)

Protz’s credentials are impeccable, and he writes in a way that makes you feel smarter just reading him. His posts are bound to be great conversation starters. Just look at Friday’s about Budvar.

It gave Evan Rail has so much to say that he put together The Truth About Budvar at Beer Culture, his view of Budvar “as it appears on the ground here in its home country.”

Must reading for a reason that Evan gets to up front: “I do think that foreign beer lovers’ emotional attachment to Budvar sometimes tends to cloud their our judgment: it’s as if we are certain Anheuser-Busch is pure evil, therefore Budvar, as its opponent, must be perfectly righteous. Of course, this line of thinking would make sense only in a comic book — in real life, situations are generally more nuanced.”

Evan carefully provides facts about Budvar and its large and small competitors you may not have seen before.

The Internet doesn’t always work this well. Misinformation abounds, but this single blog-to-blog exchange offers proof of all that Andrew Keen gets wrong in “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.”

For me and others concerned about if there is a where in our beer, Evan offers a bonus by pointing to Primátor. Not just because of the the innovative beers he describes.

With a list like that, Primátor is among the most innovative breweries in the country, and it doesn’t hurt to know that the profits go to its owner, the eastern Bohemian city of Náchod, paying for schools and roads and parks and more.

That’s a brewery I want to visit.

One quick link this morning if you want to see just where your priorities lie.

Matt Van Wyk of Flossmoor Station Restaurant & Brewery assembled a quick quiz. A couple of his questions:

4) Did you lose a friend this year because you said SNPA was so yesterday?

5) Do you only drink a beer once and then move on to the next one?

Plenty to read if you follow the link to brewvana that provoked his post and a similar conversation at The Beer Mapping Project (be sure to scroll down to Matt’s comments for another giggle).

Perhaps I’ll have some thoughtful musing about this later, but I’ve already used up my thinking-about-beer time for the morning. Priorities are priorities, right Matt?

Not only do I not care if my beer is hip, but I also will not cast my vote for president (in the primary or general election) based upon which candidate I would rather have a beer with.

That’s just a dumb idea.

Obviously the National Beer Wholesalers Association leadership wasn’t thinking of me when they came up with an online poll that lets you vote on who you would most like to have a beer with.

Apparently George Bush was that guy in 2000. Don’t people know he doesn’t drink?

So today we’ve got this story in the San Francisco Chronicle about how Barack Obama needs a good turnout among wine drinkers to have a chance of winning the California Democratic primary.

The big showdown between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could come down to California’s “beer-drinking Democrats” versus its “wine and cheese” liberals – with the Bay Area playing a pivotal role in the outcome.

Pollster Mark DiCamillo, who has been taking the state’s political pulse for 30 years, describes the beer vote as mostly blue-collar workers, the elderly and ethnic Democrats, especially Latinos, in the Los Angeles area and rural parts of the state.

The more liberal, more educated, wine-and-cheese crowd congregates here in the Bay Area, where more than a quarter of the ballots will be cast in the Democratic primary Feb. 5, he says.

And as DiCamillo sees it, the blue-collar group likes Clinton and the wine-and-cheesers go more for Obama.

“If Obama has any chance of winning California, we should see it here in the Bay Area,” DiCamillo said. “And he’ll have to be winning here by double digits” – no easy task, considering the Clintons’ long popularity in the area.

So who’s leading the beer NBWA’s poll?

Obama.

Isn’t he supposed to be the wine guy?

Monday’s post about wine prices and perception caused Josh Mishell of Flying Dog Ales and BeerDinners.com to drop me a note about an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! (Showtime) featuring a “water steward” hawking high-priced bottled water — in bottles being filled from a garden hose out back.

Thanks, Josh.

Took all of 15 seconds to find it on YouTube.

The “beer steward” stuff starts about two minutes in.

So now we know beer drinkers are smarter than wine drinkers and water drinkers.

I’m not sure what to think of the cover for the latest All About Beer magazine that prominently features New Belgium Brewing co-founder Kim Jordan with a headline that reads She makes America’s Hippest Beer.

Jay Brooks writes inside about the greening of America’s breweries (New Belgium is at the forefront), but it’s also made clear that “hippest” on the front refers to Fat Tire Amber Ale.

Look, I’m a fan of New Belgium (had Fat Tire with dinner in a restaurant Saturday) and have been writing for AABM for more than 14 years. I’m certainly not trying to pick a fight, but the hippest beer in America? In further considering the idea I came to a series of (eventually painful) conclusions:

* I have no idea which beer America’s drinkers might vote hippest.

* I don’t care if my beer his hip.

* Therefore I might just be old.

I finally figured this out after a comment from jesskidden in the discussion about “extreme beers”:

I also noted that I found using “sick” as a synonym for “great” (especially for beer) to be confusing- “This beer tastes SICK!”

This wasn’t a Belgian brewer talking about his lambic going through a bad phase. This was more like the e-mail I received from a brewer who talked about a store’s sick selection, meaning I’d like it.

Hey, it’s good that the next generation thinks beer (“craft,” “extreme,” “micro” or whatever) can be sick.

Now I’m wondering why I find the question of who brews the sickest beer more compelling than who brews the hippest.

– Philly Beer Week “officially” lasts 10 days (March 7-16), but it starts with a festival a week earlier. And it looks like they plan to pack at least a month’s worth of events in. Quite a schedule at the website.

And they’ve even got this cute commercial:

– And a story that just makes you smile — The Seattle Times updates what Charles and Rose Ann Finkel have been doing since buying back Pike Brewing in 2006. Let’s saw they aren’t resting on their considerable laurels. “Now our overall goal is to make it a world-class brewery,” Charles said.