. . . where these things hold true.
“Brewers, of course, have not been immune to state laws, which now make it illegal for one customer to be served multiple drinks, effectively outlawing trays of beer samplers. In addition, breweries holding restaurant licenses are forbidden from opening bottles of beer in view of their customers.”
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”
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.
Yes, I too am stunned that the current issue of American Brewer magazine is not dedicated to Alan McLeod (yes, you should click that link and cruise through a rather extensive discourse on the topic of “brewer as rock star”).
Anyway, that’s Tom Schlafly on the cover, co-founder of one of my hometown breweries. I’m about to open a Schlafly beer, wishing they bottled the Hop Trial: Rakau (a lovely 4.1% beer), and read about some rock stars.
Bell’s Hopslam is in the house, meaning our house. This is a good thing. It’s 10% alcohol by volume and plenty of hops were used to make this beer. We will drink some this evening, but there will be no taking or posting of notes.
Instead, the arrival of Hopslam in St. Louis — 50 cases at The Wine and Cheese Place that may already be gone (or spoken for) — is an excuse to post the perfect description of the beer. From John Mallett, who is the production manager at Bell’s.
Mallett1 is also president of the Hop Quality Group, a non-profit organization of brewers who recognize the need to communicate their interest in hop aroma to hop farmers. The tagline on the the HQG logo reads “oils over alpha,” although any particular member is as likely to say “aroma over alpha” when talking about the short history of the group.
At the 2012 Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego, Mallett and other members of the group explained just why the group was formed and described their goals. Mallett talked about the importance of communicating to growers that brewers’ needs have changed because drinkers’ tastes have changed. Aromas considered undesirable, literally for centuries, are now desirable. He used a Bell’s beer, rather obviously Hopslam, as an example.
Twenty years ago — a time, by the way, that hops such as Simcoe and Citra were already being developed, but weren’t about to find immediate popularity — there wasn’t a brewer on earth who would have gone to the annual Hop Growers of American convention and said, as he did, “I’m going to have a beer that we make 4,000 barrels of, one time a year. It flies off the shelf at damn near $20 a six-pack, and you know what it smells like? It smells like your cat ate your weed and then pissed in the Christmas tree.”
*****
1 Mallett is also the author of what will be the fourth book in Brewers Publications ingredients series, this one containing everything you could want to know about malt.
Max Bahnson “leaked” this news this morning. He and Alan McLeod are discussing the possibility of writing a book together.
What we are sure of, though, is that it will be something completely different to anything that’s so far been written about beer. The topics we are going to deal with, well, I guess those that follow our blogs can pretty much figure them out, and they will all be wrapped in a fun and perhaps rather surrealist narrative.
Surreal Beer? Beer Surreal? Not sure which is a better title.1 Anyway, can’t wait for the table of contents, let alone what follows.
P.S. guys. Scoop up that www.surrealbeer.com domain name while it’s available.
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1 Of course, the next question is: Will this lead to a new consumer group called The Campaign for Surreal Ale?