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.”

*****

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.

Another definition of, well, not ‘craft’ beer

Schalfly Irish StoutLet’s just call it a “good thing.”

The picture to the right made me smile first thing this morning when I saw Jared Williamson’s tweet from a few hours before.

Williamson is a shift brewer at The Saint Louis Brewery’s production brewery, otherwise known as Bottleworks, where they conjure up Schlafly beers. (He also makes a brief appearance in a book about hops you are sick of hearing about.) Somebody should be collecting the Twitter exchanges between he and Jeremy Danner, although like the message with this photo — “This is Irish Extra Stout w/fermcap. 202BBL in a 210BBL tank” — they might be too “inside baseball.”

The events of this morning got me thinking about the tweet itself. Not the words or the photo, but that it even happened.

First, there was an op-ed piece in today’s Post-Dispatch by Charlie Papazian and Bob Pease of the Brewers Association and Schalfly CEO Dan Kopman, headlined: “Craft or crafty? Consumers deserve to know the truth.” This was followed by a press release from the BA: “Craft vs. Crafty: A Statement from the Brewers Association.” And that included a link to a list of domestic non-craft breweries.

“Craft” has been talked to death in the U.S. beer blogosphere for years and now has infected England as well. I can hardly wait to read the same old debate in German and Polish. And, repeating what I typed here last week, this blog exists because I think the “where” (including where it is brewed, obviously) in beer matters. So I have nothing new to say on the craft/crafty front.

Instead, back to that tweet.

It connects us (whoever “us” is, but I think it is more than one guy who lives three miles from the brewery) to Schlafly beer in a way a commercial that costs more than a million dollars to show during the Super Bowl cannot.

That’s a “good thing.”

That some guy who works in the brewery took the time to snap the photo and type the words is also a “good thing.”

That nobody in “corporate” stopped him, that’s astonishing (other than the fact that Schlafly doesn’t exactly have a “corporate,” but stick with me, please). You think a shift brewer at one of the world’s brewing giants is sending foam-soaked tweets from a fermentation cellar? “Don’t let a focus group get a look at that foam.”

In the course of the morning crafty tweet overload, Danner made a fine point about the dangers of defining anything based on “what it’s not” as opposed to “what it is,” but this is an example of something that makes Schlafly-Boulevard-CivilLife-Perennial-4Hands-UrbanChestnut-and-so-in-St.Louis-and-then-beyond different. And it’s a “good thing.”

The Session #70 recapped; No. 71 announced

The SessionDavid J. Bascombe has recapped the The Session #70: Don’t Believe the Hype. Lots of interesting thoughts, and — this is one point of The Session — I added a few more bloggers to my “read regularly” list. Oh, and I still don’t believe the hype.

John at Homebrew Manual has announced the topic for #71 in January: Brewers and Drinkers. It comes with an explanation:

Brewers and Drinkers is about your relationship with beer and how it’s made. Do you brew? If so why? If not, why not? How does that affect your enjoyment of drinking beer?

Here are some things to think about if you’re stuck:

* Do you need to brew to appreciate beer?
* Do you enjoy beer more not knowing how it’s made?
* If you brew, can you still drink a beer just for fun?
* Can you brew without being an analytical drinker?
* Do brewers get to the point where they’re more impressed by technical achievements than sensory delight?
* Does more knowledge increase your awe in front of a truly excellent beer?

Just in case the world is ending Dec. 21, here are my answers now: no, huh?, yes, yes, some, and yes. Perhaps they will be better explained Jan. 4, and perhaps I’ll ramble on about something entirely different.

To participate, write a post and leave a link in comments that follow the announcement.

A Westvleteren XII pack not bought

Westvleteren XII in Spain

The point is not whether six bottles of Westvleteren XII and a couple of glasses is worth $85. That’s $5 more than it costs for a National Parks annual pass.1 Pretty easy to tell which of those is a better buy.

The point is not whether it is the World’s Best Beer.2

It’s not that a story on NPR (if you are shaking your head at this point, wondering what I’m rambling on about, that’s a good place to start) has drawn more than 100 comments.

Of course, I can’t perfectly describe the point. If there is one, I do think context is involved. When you get the right bottle, it’s an amazing beer. At that moment, particularly if you are seated in the In de Verde cafe beside the monastery, it is hard to imagine a beer being better.

It’s that good in West Flanders because of the context. It can be elsewhere as well. Although Patrick Emerson provides perspective of value from the point of view of an economist, he also puts it in very human terms: “So is Westvleteren 12 worth $85 for six? Well that is for you to decide, for some it will not be and for others it will. This will be a function of how much enjoyment you’ll get from drinking it, how much you cherish the opportunity to try it and your ability to pay for it (among other things).”

And when you are in Toledo, Spain, there may be no context. That’s where the picture at the top was taken in August (I think I posted it on Twitter). The package was €50 (about $63 at the time).

It might still be sitting there.

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1 Unless you are 62 years old. Then it costs $10 for a pass that lasts as long as you do.

2 There is no such thing.