the session

The Session #74 topic announced: Finding beer balance

The SessionHost Bryan Roth has announced the topic for April’s Session, the 74th for those of you keeping score at home, is “Finding Beer Balance.” Here are the basics:

Is beer your vice? Is beer your reward? Does beer really have to be either? Do you find lifestyle balance through work, hobbies, family or maybe even “Dry Days” like David Bascombe? There are a variety of ways to find balance.

These questions are simply a jumping-off point. No matter what your answer, I’d love for you to join us in April. Here’s how to participate:

– Think of a response to post on your blog. Or just leave a response in the comment section – no blog (or blogging experience) necessary.
– Post your response on “Finding Beer Balance” on April 5.
– Come back to this post and leave a comment with a link to your response.
It’s that easy. But most important, don’t forget to check out the great work of other participants. I’ll have a round-up of all the responses on Sunday, April 7.

Should your brain need a jump start, Boak and Bailey recently addressed the question “What is balance in beer?” (I hesitated the reference, since it includes a nod toward my latest book and you probably feel I’ve been slagging that enough. Read it anyway.)

Session #73: A different sort of beer audit

Thomas Hardy's aleSee that cork? There was a time, not long before the photo was taken, that the top of the cork and the surrounding glass were dead level.

Occasionally a beer like this will reach out, smack you upside the head, and make a gesture like this, essentially screaming, “I’m 40 years old, drink me.”

More often, you’ll screw it up. Stick a beer behind some others in the cellar. Let it sit long enough you hate to part with it. Eventually you’ll have a collector’s item. Valued at auction only for the bottle itself and label. (Yes, a wink and a nod in the direction of eBay.)

Years ago, a friend’s sister died. She had a few cases of wine she’s tucked away when he husband died several years ago. Our friends wondered which of these might be particularly good to drink now (understand that “now” was then). They asked me to look at them. I don’t really know that much about wine, but I brought along a couple of vintage books — the ones that list which years are good for which regions. I didn’t need the books. These were obviously old bottles of cheap wine, some red, some white, like it mattered.

Age does not make most wine better. It certainly does not make most beer better.

The SessionHold that thought as we consider the topic of The Session #73: Beer Audit. Sort of consider, because to be honest, what follows does not come from the list of suggested topics.

Not that long ago beers like Thomas Hardy’s Ale, the one so determined at the top of this post to pop the cork, were an anomaly. Beers weren’t as strong, packaging technology wasn’t as good. There were lots of reasons not to cellar beer.1

The beer world has also changed in other ways, ultimately because what drinkers want is different (or at least broader). Not only are there more strong beers, but more beers packed with all sorts of ingredients, more beers aged in barrels, more crazy beers, more beers you might as well lay down because they sure as shit aren’t drinkable right now.

Check out the links that will pop up at Pints and Pubs today. I suspect there will be plenty of photos of drop-dead beer collections. And beyond the relatively few participating in The Session there are hundreds (thousands?) who have even more impressive libraries. And there’s every chance that some of the bottles we’re talking about will be better with five years or ten years on them than most Thomas Hardy’s were at five and ten.

The first vintage of Hardy’s was brewed in 1967 and released in 1968. Think of the movies finished in 1967 and up for the Oscars in 1968. Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In The Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Doctor Dolittle.

Aside from the last one — anybody up for laying down some cans of Pabst to watch along with Doctor Doolittle? — those are classics, if occasionally dated. They age better than beer. I saw them on the screen then (even DD) and I’ve seen them relatively recently (except for DD). I didn’t drink a Hardy’s in 1968, but I did taste the contents of that 1968 bottle in 2008.

So given that the topic today is beer audit I’m thinking about my relationship with beer, why I choose to drink what I do at particular times, why I choose to occasionally cellar a few beers, why I pick the ones I do, why I decide to haul one out.

That’s all, just thinking about it.

*****

1 In case you feel the need to educate me about the history of cellaring, I know there have long been some beers to lay down, including lambics and others with considerable heft. If you want to read more about the latter, I suggest you buy a copy of Amber, Gold & Black: The History of Britain’s Great Beers for a proper footnote.

The Session #73 announced: Beer audit

The SessionAdam at Pints and Pubs has announced that the topic for The Session #73 with be Beer Audit.

Time to check out your cellar, or whatever passes for a cellar, beer fridge, and any place else you store beer.

I’m interested to know if you take stock of the beers you have, what’s in your cellar, and what does it tell you about your drinking habits. This could include a mention of the oldest, strongest, wildest beers you have stored away, the ratio of dark to light, strong to sessionable, or musings on your beer buying habits and the results of your cellaring.

Per usual, anybody is welcome to participate in The Session. Simply post on March 1 and send Adam a link. He’ll write a recap that appears a few days later.

The Session #72 recapped: Lots of beer love

The SessionRyan Newhouse has posted the roundup for The Session #72: How We Love Beer.

It seems most people didn’t struggle as much with the question as I did. And I particularly like Ryan’s preface to the recap.

What I especially enjoyed about these articles is that they overwhelmingly told a story about the journey we are, or have been, on. It’s not all rose-colored beer glasses – sometimes beer is frustrating, disappointing, or mysterious. But we keep coming back to it because at its center we find not only something that brings us joy – we find those around us who share our passion, and that’s just lovely.

Adam at Pints and Pubs will host The Session #73. Look for an announcement soon.

The Session #72: Beer love

I guess we’ve come full circle
We’re strangers once again
It’s hard to know we’d ever come to this
It’s funny you were saying how you’d miss
The good ole times
While all alone I’m thinking
You’re the one I’ll miss

Love’s a word I never throw around
So when I say I love you ’til the end
I’m talking about ’til the day
They toss me in the ground
Love’s a word I never throw around

        – Robert Earl Keen, “Love’s a Word I Never Throw Around”

The Session

For the 72nd gathering of The Session host Ryan Newhouse asks contributors write about “How We Love Beer.” The key word, he points out, is how. “I’m not looking for what characteristics beer has that makes us love it, but what we do to show our love for it.”

One of my personal rules when I write about anything is to question everything, including myself. In this case the question is: Do I write about beer, in this space and elsewhere, because I have a taste for it, because I’m addicted to collecting stories and retelling them, or because writing about beer is my primary source of income?

The answer is B and C, but of course there is another question. One I continue to consider more than five years after Michael Jackson wrote this mysterious paragraph, at least mysterious to me, in a column that appeared in All About Beer magazine after he died.

Being a critic is one of the things I do for a living. Being a reporter is another. Is a reporter a fearless seeker-out of truth, neutral and objective? Or does he recruit those qualities in support of his personal passions? When I enlisted, at the age of sixteen, I may have been attracted by the powerful purity of the first role. In the event, I grew into the second.

I would have liked to have asked him just what he meant there, about the reporter part, not the critic part. Not that I would necessarily have agreed with him, but because it seems to me thinking about such matters may result in better beer writing. And although showing a little love for beer in general is not my primary goal in improving how I write about the topic, it’s probably a side effect.

Enough about me. Tomorrow it’s back to writing about beer, maybe Clydesdales and Budweiser Black Crown, or perhaps how the distortion of the essential oil composition during isolation by steam distillation can significantly interfere with hop analysis and cause imprecise quantification of key compounds. I might be kidding.