musing

Beer is back in the news

Gee, I’m not sure the article was that bad.

Both Jay Brooks and Beercraft Blog take a piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to task for an article headlined “Beer sales falling flat as wine, other beverages grow in popularity.”

Granted, the story had its problems, but having just returned from a couple of weeks of grabbing newspapers and magazines I don’t often read I was impressed by the amount of positive attention craft beer is getting. I didn’t see anything comparable for wine or spirits.

In Champaign (Illinois) a local newspaper story offered kudos to the Blind Pig, an old/new bar who owner has shifted his emphasis from music to beer.

In St. Louis, Sauce Magazine’s Readers’ Choice 2006 poll featured the results of Favorite Local Brewery (Saint Louis Brewery/Schlafly beers) and Favorite Beer Selection (Growlers Pub) on the same page with Favorite Butcher and Favorite Coffee Roaster.

In Chicago, Where Magazine – stocked in hotel rooms throughout the metropolitan area – reported on “Beer, Glorious Beer.” It included four breweries and four brewpubs.

The Chicago Reader, a leading alternative newspaper, supplemented a feature on ice cream floats with a piece about beer floats.

In Milwaukee, Travelhost Magazine, another hotel supplement, reviewed several beer friendly restaurants.

That’s a lot of positive coverage.

And it’s not on the business pages. Business writers have long grouped big beer and little beer together when it comes to spotting trends or comparing beer sales to sales of spirits. That’s not going to stop.

Business stories report on what has (or is) happening. These other stories help influence what (is or) will be occuring.

Beer: Simple or complex?

French wine philosopher Pierre Boisset once said:

“Wine is at the same time simpler than people say and more complex than they think.”

Pretty easy to plug in the word beer for wine and make as much sense.

The quote comes from Hugh Johnson’s delightful memoir A Life Uncorked and he bring it up to make a point.

“Any fool can make a subject complex and any fool can say it is simple. But how much do you have to understand to grasp the essentials?” Johnson asks.

He goes on to write that most people try either too hard at wine or not hard enough, that it is an all-or-nothing passion.

“So what does the reasonable, perfectly balanced person need to know? That wine is not one thing, but many. To appreciate it you don’t have to swallow an encyclopaedia, but you do have to pay attention.”

Again, the analogy holds up well, just as it would for cheese, jazz or … pick your passion.

Your own personal beer aromas

A couple of months back I wrote about how our beer drinking experiences may improve as we develop a better vocabulary to discuss what we are tasting.

A paper delivered by a wine expert last month shows it is never that simple.

Decanter reports:

Clues to understanding why we all perceive wines differently were unveiled by an American scientist at the Masters of Wine Symposium in Napa.

Speaking at the June gathering of MWs, which takes place every four years, Dr Charles Wysocki, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, an organisation devoted to taste and smell, said wine is “tasted” principally by smell.

Humans have only a few hundred stimuli for taste, but can distinguish thousands of different smells. Wine aromas, however, are not the same for everyone and quite possibly as unique to each individual as a fingerprint.

No surprise that context turns out to be very important. For instance, you may forever react to a particular aroma based upon your experiences the first time you smelled it.

You may also form an opinion based on how it is presented.

Wysocki also demonstrated, using an audience of wine professionals from around the world, that putting the same aroma in differently labelled bottles produced radically different perceptions.

If a pungent, mouldy cheese-like aroma was labelled “food,” the audience tended to rate it as pleasant. If it was labelled “body,” it was considered unattractive.

But back to to aroma/taste and how it might fit in with previous experiences. Donavan Hall touched on this in writing about the character of Orval, which changes over time.

One of my friends described it as “wet saddle blanket,” but I have to say I have no idea what these people are talking about. I grew up on a working farm. I had a horse for a pet. I know what horse and leather smells like. I had my nose in my fair share of wet saddle blankets and Orval reminds me of none of the experiences.

Personally, Michael Jackson’s use of “hop sack” (he also included “fresh leather”) in describing Orval left the aroma of that beer and the term hop sack so closely connected in my mind that if you said “hop sack” I would imagine the aroma of Orval first. If you handed me wet burlap that once held a bail of hops and it smelled different I would think, “This is not what hop sack should smell like.”

When beer wishes come true

There’s a reason that the Potable Curmudgeon is near the top of the beer links (on the right). Roger Baylor wrote the entry he posted yesterday back in 1998. That’s when he most of his ramblings appeared in the FOSSILS newsletter, a photocopied homebrew club newsletter. It deserved reading more than once then and is worth re-reading this morning.

Now, through the wonders of the Internet and blogging, you can read it simply by clicking.

The account is about a visit Mitch Steele, who at that time worked in the specialty brewing group at Anheuser-Busch, made to the FOSSILS homebrew club meeting in New Albany, Ind.

It concludes:

At the same time, here’s to the hope that we haven’t lost him forever, that some day he is awakened to the reality that his professional skills are being given over to an advanced technical proficiency that by definition threatens to obliterate the spiritual and artistic natures of his field of endeavor.

Hey, Mitch: It’s never too late. C’mon over to our side.

Of course Roger dug this out of the archives because Steele recently went to work at Stone Brewing in California as the head brewer.

Who cares if beer has a tail?

Geez, take a few days to go drink beer with homebrewers (the National Homebrew Conference) and all kinds of interesting discussions break out related to our access to better beer.

First there was this: The long tail of the alcohol distribution curve in a business innovation blog.

That lead to this interesting post: Did the Long Tail just become a hit, or did it jump the shark, or is it just mainstream now?

And this one from the Long Tail itself, which might help you understand more about the “long tail” concept. (Daniel Bradford also wrote about this in his editorial in the May issue of All About Beer Magazine.)

If you’ve got this far and not clicked yet then much of this is summarized by Jay Brooks before he adds lots of thoughts of his own. It’s hard to comment on Jay’s post – other than to note he obviously has too much time on his hands – because he touches on many subjects I’d like to agree, and sometimes disagree, with him on.

So to stick with one: When he writes “we must act as a cohesive group” you may not be sure how that might include you.

Stone Brewing co-founder Greg Koch put the responsibility for keeping great beer available for all of us – and making it available to still more – on all of us. If his keynote address gets posted online somewhere I’ll add a link. For now, a quick summary from memory (disclaimer: I was drinking Stone IPA at the time, having judged beers all morning).

If you go into a restaurant, bar or beer store that isn’t offering the beer you want then demand that they do – or at least some other great beer. Remember you are the one who gets to define what a great beer is – not a fast-talking distributor.

Don’t serve your friends “stepping stone” beers because they are have more flavor than mainstream but not as much as those you like because you fear your friends (and relatives) can’t handle that much. Koch used the example of ordering a keg of beer for a wedding. Serve them great beer and they’ll thank you for it.

The access to market issues that Jay concludes his post with are real – in fact, I heard some other scary tales over the weekend – but there’s still a grass roots element to the Great Beer Movement (notice how we’ve moved up from better beer to great beer?).

That’s our part.