musing

Another beer flavor/flavour wheel

Beer Flavor Wheel, Beer Flavour Wheel

Mark Dredge posted this new Beer Flavor Wheel today at Pencil and Spoon. (If you click on the image you’ll head over to his blog, where the wheel is a bit larger).

This is a much more drinker friendly wheel than the traditional one, created for Dredge’s new book, Craft Beer World, which just went to the printer. As mentioned here before, the beer flavor wheel was developed in the 1970s by the Master Brewers Association of the Americas and the American Society of Brewing Chemists following the lead of Danish flavor chemist Morten Meilgaard. It was one of the first such wheels. A wine aroma wheel came later, as did the Flavour Wheel for Maple Products, a South African brandy wheel, and a variety of other fun dials.

The Beer Wheel was not designed for consumers but to provide reference compounds that can be added to beer samples to represent the intended flavors. It continues to grow in size, and there is every possibility that the committees working on its redesign will settle on several subwheels.

Also mentioned here, and pictured in For the Love of Hops
the Hochschule RheinMain University of Applied Science created a Beer Aroma Wheel (actually two wheels) with the goal of providing terms more suitable for communicating with consumers and focusing less on defects.

Panelists who helped develop the terminology used aromas of fruits, spices, everyday materials, and other foodstuffs to describe their sensory impression. Because there is the rare occasion where 4-vinyl guaiacol is appropriate in conversation, but rare remains the best adjective. Clove works much better in mixed company (geeks and non geeks).

So this is why they called their first born ‘Wheat Ale’

Co-founder Tom Schlafly, and I guess everybody else at the St. Louis Brewery (which makes Schafly beer), suddenly put this brewery-turning-21 stuff into an entirely new context.

In this case as well as the importance of context there’s the matter of repercussions. Schalfly Beer turned 21 years old last week. Sometime after that a child would have been conceived under the influence of likely more than one Schlafly beer. The company would like to make sure that bit of history isn’t lost, as Schlafly explained in the employee blog.

As most remaining ARs (adult readers) realize, Schlafly Beer celebrated its 21st birthday on December 26, 2012. Thus, according to my calculations, the first baby conceived by one or both parents under the influence of our beer is likely to celebrate his or her 21st birthday sometime in the fall of 2013. The obvious way to recognize this individual would be to buy him or her a beer on his or her birthday. The problem, however, is that this person is not yet old enough to drink legally. As a socially responsible company we are not allowed to market to this person, whoever he or she may be. We can, however, reach out to the conceiving parents, which is exactly what we’re doing.

If any of you amorous readers (yet another kind of ARs), think you may be the parents of the first baby conceived under the influence of Schlafly Beer, we encourage you to share your story by sending it to questions@schlafly.com. I’m not exactly sure what kind of recognition we plan to give to the individuals involved (conceivers and conceived) and would welcome recommendations on this point from other ARs. Depending on the response, we may post parental recollections of moments of conception on line and let ARs help us decide what kind of recognition would be appropriate. It might even be worth posting maternal and paternal memories separately and comparing them for consistency. Embarrassed offspring will not be allowed to comment until after they’ve celebrated their 21st birthdays, by which time their parents’ stories will have gone viral and it will be too late.

Benjamin Braddock: Goddamn, that’s great. So old Elaine Robinson got started in a Ford.

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Why “Wheat Ale” rather than “Pale Ale”? See Stephen Hale’s explanation.

Hey, olllllo, better copyright ‘Two Ounce Culture’

Copyright “Two Ounce Culture,” trademark it, maybe even “Two Ounce Beer Culture” as well, before I pretend I thought of this simply brilliant phrase to characterize the taste, rate, move on mentality.

Rob Fullmer, aka olllllo, posted this yesterday, linking to and quoting from a New Yorker article that is worth the, well, time — which is part of what it’s about. Here’s what he put in bold type:

As soon as we start to think of art simply as something to be consumed, discarded, and replaced, we rob it of one of its greatest powers: its capacity to free us from the grip of easier but shallower pleasures.

I am not suggesting revisiting the chase our tail debate about beer and brewing as art. For me, it works just to replace the word art with the word beer and read the sentence again.

The brilliance of beer is that any particular beer can do this, but without itself becoming the center of conversation.

Saint Arnold Brewing founder Brock Wagner made that point maybe 10 years ago: “We want you to think about what you are drinking. I’ll think about the beer when I first taste it. After that I’m sitting there with my wife and with friends shooting the breeze and it becomes background. But periodically I will think about the beer again.”

Little of that in the “Two Ounce Culture.”

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Rob begins his post with a challenge: “I often ask my beer friends and those that claim an allegiance to a beer culture they seem to think exists only in sampling form, ‘What was the last beer that you remember having three in a row of.’ I can tell you my last four of three. It was New Belgium La Folie, Four Peaks KiltLifter, Four Peaks Eight Street and Coors Banquet.”

I thought about this and realized I would flunk. I can’t remember the last time I had drank the same beer again, and then again. Two in a row, that’s easy. That would be Schlafly TIPA. Before that (512) Pecan Porter, and before that Urban Chestnut Zwickel.

One more reason to love August Schell Brewing

August Schell T-Shirt at Zion National Park

This photo comes with a disclaimer (what doesn’t these days?) but that doesn’t change the basics. Me, wearing an August Schell Brewing T-shirt, at Zion National Park.

Schell, of course, is the brewery name on everybody’s lips after Jace Marti’s great post on the company’s Facebook (it drew 150 comments) that provided significant perspective to the “Craft vs. Crafty” kerfuffle.

Schell brews excellent beer, but drinking it will always be better because we visited the brewery in New Ulm. Definitely a “beer from a place” experience. I own the T-shirt (which is looking a little weary these days) because it was a prize given out during judging for the Upper Mississippi Mash-Out in January of 2008. When you signed in to judge that entered your name in a drawing. If it showed up on a list after a round of judging you could pick out a prize. Mine came up rather late, so I was plenty happy to see the T-shirt still there.

A few months later we were at Zion in southern Utah — the final shakedown cruise before our grand adventure. I was waiting for Daria and Sierra to return from a side adventure when I heard somebody behind me say, “I have to take a picture of that.” I realized I was “that.” She didn’t care that the T-shirt was from one of America’s oldest breweries, just about the message, “It’s always happy hour somewhere.”

After Daria and Sierra and returned we headed out I told them about what just happened. Daria made me go back and sit down. The result was the photo you see. Thus the disclaimer.