The Session #113: A few pub observations

The SessionThis is my contribution to this month’s Session, “Mass Observation: The Pub and The People.” Now that I have read host Boak & Bailey’s post I would give this a C-. I already knew that I would receive a lower mark because I did not anonymise (or with a z) the pub, but their report makes it clear I could have collected much more data that would be of use to a twenty-second century athropologist. They also raise the question of how the presence of an observer may affect what is being observed. For instance, there are questions I would have liked to have asked Will Gilbert, but that’s not what I was there to do.

*****

This was not the best time to observe what might be called typical at Riley’s Pub in the Tower Grove East neighborhood of St. Louis.

During a commercial break for the Jeopardy, the TV game show everybody had come in to watch, a man found an opening at the bar and squeezed in to order two more glasses of Urban Chestnut Zwickel. “This is the busiest I’ve seen this place, like busier than the World Cup,” he said.

Urban Chestnut beers, Zwickel and STLIPA, as well as Guinness (because it was Thursday) were just $3.50 a pint, and Riley’s set out free snacks. That’s not why both rooms of the pub were full. Friends and neighbors had come to see Will Gilbert, like them a regular at Riley’s, compete on Jeopardy. Of course he was at the party, because the show is taped in advance.

A bartender at Riley's Pub tends to the tapsAt 4:15, 15 minutes before the program would start, there were still seats at the bar. They quickly disappeared by the time the bartender poured a Zwickel, a Zwickel, a Harp, another Zwickel, opened the Guinness tap, slid a can of 4 Hands City Wide across the bar and filled two glasses of water before returning finish the Guinness pour.

“Do you know Will?” one man asked as they made their way toward the less crowded second room. “I’ve played trivia with him,” said the second.

Sometimes trivia means the same thing in St. Louis as in most cities — something bars offers on a week night to attract customers. But St. Louis also has a unique trivia culture, found in churches on Saturday night (and beer is welcome). So it was a big deal when Gilbert landed a spot on Jeopardy.

Although Riley’s is sometimes grouped with other “Irish pubs” (like seemingly everywhere, St. Louis has plenty), I’d simply call it a neighborhood tavern. It’s the only commercial establishment in the immediate neighborhood. It’s the kind of place that holds fundraisers for the local high school and invites customers to sit quietly during televised political debates.

Last Thursday the draft choices were Civil Life American Brown, Civil Life Rye Pale Ale, Guinness, Smithwicks, Harp, UCBC STLIPA, UCBC Zwickel, and Schlafly Pale Ale. They don’t change very often.

When Gilbert’s picture appeared on the screen (there were two televisions in the bar area, another in the adjoining room) at 4:24 a cheer went up. The place went silent when the competition began, but low level conversations returned quickly enough. Mostly cheers followed, sometimes when he got an answer right, other times when one of his competitors got one wrong. Once in a while a chant — “Will! Will! Will!” — broke out. Wearing a T-shirt decorated with a St. Louis city flag and holding an Urban Chestnut ceramic mug Gilbert settled at one end of the bar, a step outside most of the madness.

He commented occasionally, without raising his voice, like any other afternoon when he and friends were watching the show, as they do often at Riley’s.

“This is the one, Patrick. It is your fault I didn’t know this.”

“I knew this one. I was pissed.”

He led going into Final Jeopardy (for those unfamiliar with Jeopardy, this is how it works), but got the final answer wrong. It took a moment for his friends to understood what he knew long ago. “Will! Will! Will!” they chanted, then applauded long and hard.

In the 45 minutes between the time I got a seat at the bar and Jeopardy ended I saw the bartender, sometimes with a bit of help, pour 18 glasses of Zwickel. Perhaps the price was a factor, but it was also a Zwickel sort of day, the temperature hitting 97 degrees and the heat index topping 100. She drew five glasses of Guinness, two of Schlafly Pale (plus a pitcher), two Civil Life Browns and two Rye Pale Ales, one UCBC STLIPA, and one Harp. She also handed out six bottles of Stag, three cans of City Wide, one bottle of wine (chilled in a Bud Light bucket) and one single glass, and mixed (about) six drinks made with spirits.

Categories (beer styles) help us like things more

Tom Vanderbilt’s You May Also Like:Taste in an Age of Endless Choice is an absolutely fascinating book, although it likely won’t leave you satisfied if you expect an answer to the question of why we like what we like. But he introduces so many ideas, like this one from an article in The Guardian: “With the internet, we have a kind of city of the mind, a medium that people do not just consume but inhabit, even if it often seems to replicate and extend existing cities (New Yorkers, already physically exposed to so many other people, use Twitter the most). As Bentley has argued, ‘Living and working online, people have perhaps never copied each other so profusely (since it usually costs nothing), so accurately, and so indiscriminately.'”

He gets around to discussing beer late in his book, and that might make its way into something I write. Meanwhile, a non-beer-specific thought from the final chapter, which is made up of a series of messages—a sort of “field guide to liking” in a world of infinite variety.

We like thing more when they can be categorized. Our pattern-macthing brains are primed to categorize the world, and we seem to like things the more they resemble what we think they should. Studies have found that when subjects look at pictures of mixed-race people and are asked to judge their attractiveness, the answer depends on what categories are used; a Chinese-american man may be judged more attractive than men in general but less attractive than Chinese men. Things that are “hard to categorize” are hard to like—until we invent new categories. We like things more when we can categorize them, and categories can help up like things more, even things that aren’t as good as we might like.

You could read this as an argument for more beer styles. Please do not show it to anybody with the power to make that happen.

If you were a beer conference keynote speaker …

Linotype machineMaybe I should have asked this question earlier, given that 2016 Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference is just a week off.

But what would you talk about if you were going to give the keynote speech?

Or maybe the question is, what would you like to hear about?

I already plan to use this image and (technology permitting) some audio from James McMurtry.

Yes, I will include your name (maybe even your url or twitter handle) if I quote you. Unless it is really clever, in which case I will take all the credit.

Monday links: The culture & business of beer

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 6.27.16

Talking Pride Over Pints
Pride is an important part of what Robin LeBlanc says here, but so is this: “Longtime readers will no doubt agree with the fact that I see beer as exceptional background material to significant social goings-on. It’s the people you’re with that are more important than what you’re drinking, though it helps if the drink is good enough to help enhance the situation from behind the scenes. For the most part, beer should pleasantly accompany the night and not demand your attention if you don’t want it to.” [Via Torontoist, h/T Alan McLeod, among others]

Piero Rodriguez, MIA Beer brewer, killed in car crash.
It makes me sad I never heard of Rodriquez before he died. “And he was punk, through and through, from his tight pants with combat boots and T-shirts with obscure band names, to his taste in music. At MIA Beer, he set up a pair of turntables between the brewery and the tasting room, where he could watch over his gurgling beer boilers and spin everything from the Ramones to the Clash, not to mention a host of insider-only bands.” [Via Miami Herald]

Stout Decline: Guinness Slides in Popularity, Status.
So how are Guinness sales in the United States these days? I’ve recently wandered into several St. Louis taverns/pubs I don’t frequent, trying to settle on what to write about for The Session #113. I’ve seen lots of Guinness handles, and for that matter more drinkers choosing Guinness than, say, Ballast Point Sculpin. But I’ve also been in places that previously had Guinness on tap and it is no longer there. What does this all mean? [Via All About Beer]

What We Mean When We Talk About the ‘Death’ of Flagship Beers.
[Via This Is Why I’m Drunk}
Death of the Flagships: But Why?
[Via Stouts & Stilettos]
Is The Age of the Flagship Beer Over?
[Via Bear Flavored Ales]
And you thought “Brexit” was the story you couldn’t escape last week. This is an important business story if you are in the business. Thus ultimately it has implications for consumers. But as I just mentioned, I’ve recently been looking at draft selections at many taverns I don’t regularly frequent. This is obviously St. Louis specific, and to places where people gather just to talk, or sometimes because it is the best place to watch Jeopardy or the Cardinals or football/soccer or whatever on the TV. It is a small sample, and we’re not talking about what’s going on in grocery stores, convenient stores, and liquors store, where most beer is sold. I wouldn’t claim is represents the “other 99 percent” but it does fall outside the 1 percent that Bryan Roth (first link) writes about.

So what did I see? The Urban Chestnut tap handle is going to pour Zwickel, the Schlafly handle Pale Ale, the Civil Life handle American Brown, and so on. And there may well be buckets full of ice and Bud Light on the table. It’s not exactly the same everywhere. For one thing sometimes these breweries will have a second handle. And a can of 4 Hands City Wide sliding across a bar top is more noticeable than a bottle of Stag being jammed into a koozie. But there’s still a time and a place for the familiar.

Why you can’t get a pint in a beer bar anymore.
Another business/consumer story. If you make it to the end you’ll read Jeremy Danner talking about the Midwest, specifically Kansas City. It’s the same on the other side of Missouri, the neighborhood spots mentioned above almost always serving beer in pint glasses or “cheater” 14-ounce shakers — even beers you’ll get a smaller measure of if you visit the brewery. Jeff Alworth is also quoted at the end, but no mention of his honest pint project. [Via Washington Post]

How the sounds you hear affect the taste of your beer.
Didn’t Pete Brown already tell us this? [Via Washington Post]

11 jobs in the beer industry guaranteed to make you jealous.
Maybe not all 11. I don’t want to be the person “Upping America’s koozie game with one-size-fits-all beerwear.” However, given that Jared Williamson tweeted “Funny, production shift brewer isn’t on this list” a few examples why not: profiles of Jared, Jonathan Moxey at Perennail Arisan Ales, and Andrew Mason of 3 Floyds Brewing. Not the sexiest jobs going. [Via Trillist]

WINE & TERROIR (BECAUSE BEER TERROIR MAY ALSO BE A THING)

The Weird World Of Expensive Wine.
I’d be inclined to cross out the word “weird” and replace it with “terrifying.” “Maybe you can actually taste the money.” [Via FiveThirtyEight]

Demystifying Terroir: Maybe It’s The Microbes Making Magic In Your Wine
Wait, bacteria and fungi may affect the flavor? Have they heard about this in the Senne Valley? [Via NPR]

FROM TWITTER

As usual, click on the date to read the thread.

Not all hop acres are created equal

The expanded hop acreage report released this week by Hop Growers of America indicates that acres strung for harvest in states outside the Pacific Northwest increased almost 58 percent between 2015 and 2016 to nearly 2,000 acres. And what does that mean?

American hop growing regions 2014

I pose this as a question I am not prepared to answer. I hauled out this map, which represents where hops were being grown in 2014, for my Zymurgy Live presentation last month. Look at it and you might think brewers in much of the country have access to locally grown hops. But in 2014 only 2 percent of planted acres were in those red circles. In 2015 the number increased to 2.8 percent and in 2016 to 3.7 percent.

Right now those acres are not nearly as productive as the ones inside the blue circle. It will be several years before we can measure how productive, or not, they are. If you look at the numbers you will see acres in Michigan doubled in 2016. Outside the Northwest it will be three years before a hop plant reaches maturity. Yields will be less until then, and of course less in years when growing conditions are not favorable. This is agriculture.

Right now it doesn’t look like most non-Northwest hop yards will manage yields equal to those in the Yakima Valley. So farmers in New York, Michigan and elsehwere will not be able to compete strictly on price. Can they in other ways? Steve Miller, hired by the Cornell Cooperative Extension in 2011 as the state’s first hop specialist, thinks so. “I think five years from now we’ll be in that (competitive) position,” he said last year. “(Brewers will say) this Fuggle or this Cascade is not just local. I actually like it better than I can get elsewhere.”

Another wild card is interest in neomexicanus varieties. So a bit of background. The genus Humulus likely originated in Mongolia at least six million years ago. A European type diverged from that Asian group more than one million years ago; a North American group migrated from the Asian continent approximately 500,000 years later. Although there are five botanical varieties of Humulus — H. lupulus (the European type, also found in Asia and Africa; later introduced to North America), H. cordifolius (found in Eastern Asia, Japan), H. lupuldoides (Eastern and north-central North America), H. pubescens (primarily Midwestern United States), and H. neomexicanus (Western North America) — the first and last are of interest to brewers.

Hops of American heritage, which include some grown in Australia and New Zealand (and now even England and Germany), contain compounds found only at trace levels in hops originating in England and on the European continent. Among them is a thiol called called 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one (otherwise referred to as 4MMP), a main contributor to the muscat grape/black currant character associated with American-bred hops such as Cascade, Simcoe, and Citra. It has a low odor threshold and occurs naturally in grapes, wine, green tea, and grapefruit juice. It is one contributor to what were described as “unhoppy” aromas not long ago and today as desirable “fruity, exotic flavors derived from hops.”

Interest in native American hops is twofold. First, they have had hundreds or thousands of years to adapt to their environment and develop resistance to local diseases. They may well be better suited to growing in new regions than varieties bred for the American Northwest. Second, they may contain compounds that yield new aromas and flavors

I mentioned Todd Bates’ breeding program and the “Frank Zappa hop” last month, but it is worth adding that varieties Eric Desmarais at CLS Farms chose not to grow are showing up elsewhere. The names to look for are Neo and Amalia. A story in Local Flavor magazine indicates Santa Fe Brewing bought the entire stock from CLS, but the rhizomes were previously available via mail order and got shipped to all sorts of locations.

At Homebrew Con week before last a homebrewer showed my a photo of his Neo plant climbing right up a wire attached to the roof of his house. That’s local.