Curtis at HopHeadSaid hosts The Session #55, asking contributors to to write about “fabulous world of beer art found on coasters, labels and caps.” This is my contribution. Check out what everybody else has to say in his roundup.

The liquid is gone. Bits of paper and vivid memories remain.

As much affection as I have for table tent from Bell’s Brewery that reads “Pierces your tongue without the nasty metal taste” and sits on a bookcase in the corner it doesn’t soothe my soul like the coaster pictured below. Make no mistake, we love Bell’s beers and during our grand adventure they let us camp in the brewery parking lot. But the table tents (the other reads, “Not tested on animals. Probably because we get so many volunteers.) are not connected to a specific memory.

This one is. The photo first appeared “Where in the Beer World?” nearly three years ago, and you’ll find the basic story there. It was taken during a memorable evening with Evan Rail that included several stops. This was the special one, and we might have lingered longer. However, when the conversation in Russian behind us started to get louder Evan suggested it was time to move on. “I think they might be in the mob,” he said.

Anyway, we’ve still got the coaster.

We don’t really collect coasters. We grab them along the way, toss them in a drawer, use them, weed them out from time to time. It would be even more dangerous to collect bottles (and the labels), so the rule is “new one in, old one out.” The only permanent fixture is the empty bottle of Thomas Hardy’s Ale from 1968.

I wrote about opening the bottle here and here. It was produced at the Eldridge Pope Brewery, which is connected to still more memories for us.

I’ve already taken a look at the roundup (growing as I write) and some of the artwork is wonderful.

For instance, the new labels Left Hand Brewing introduced in 2010 are flat out stunning. But we’re not ready to throw out our old-style Left Hand coaster. Got it at Mike O’Shay’s Restaurant in Longmont.

But that’s another story.

Deep into a discussion at A Good Beer Blog that has a bit of everything — cyclical malaise, math, hop breeding, Stephen Beaumont, blog comment of the year from Bailey — host Alan McLeod added another topic.

(Editor’s note: A Good Beer Blog moved since this was written, so the links don’t work but the post and comments have been archived by Wayback Machine. Or you can visit the post in its new home.)

I still don’t believe in beer community. Not one person has shown up to help me move the furniture. Pity the person who confuses people who sell you stuff for their best friends.

I commented that perhaps he should give that thought a thread of its own (before I did). He replied, “You start it and, in response, I will both bolster the point and yet confuse it with other tangential baggage that makes it lose its way.”

At the time I was reading a post by Rob Fullmer’s at Beer PHXation about the Phoenix beer blogging community, which obviously includes a discussion of the local beer community and why “our beer culture seems incomplete and disconnected.” At the end he writes, “Let’s build a community.”

So a few thoughts and/or questions jump out:

– Is Alan serious?

– Do people consciously build beer-centric communities or does beer end up playing a larger role in an already existing community?

– Do the beer communities of Asheville, N.C., and Bamberg, Germany, overlap or exist in separate spheres?

– Are brewers (or breweries) and beer enthusiasts part of the same beer community?

– Are brewers (or breweries) and beer enthusiasts part of the same community? My answer to that one is brewery owners need to understand how important that is. At least at the basic community level, that being the one in which show up to help move the furniture is part of the discussion.

Today at Grantland, Michael Kruse examines how those wild and wacky uniforms have helped turn the University of Oregon into a national college football power.

. . . the head of a think tank and a visiting scholar at Berkeley’s Center for Research on Social Change gave a wonky talk at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. “We are headed,” Michael H. Goldhaber said, “into what I call the attention economy.”

Economics is the study of the allocation of resources that are scarce. These days, more and more, information isn’t scarce. Stuff isn’t scarce. What’s scarce is attention. The companies that win in an attention economy are those that win the eyeballs of people who have too much to look at. Too many ads. Too many screens in too many places. Too many games on too many channels on too many days of the week.

“This new economy,” Goldhaber said in Cambridge in January 1997, “is based on endless originality.

“If you have enough attention,” he added, “you can get anything you want.”

The uniforms got the attention of talented high school football players from across the nation. That’s where the story begins and ends, but there are other things to consider along the way. These are relative to beers that are different; weird, wacky, extreme if you like, but maybe only as different a pumpkin beers.

At times this might be a little unsettling.

“If attention is now at the center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style,” UCLA professor Richard Lanham wrote in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. “It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance trade places.

“Push style to the extreme,” Lanham wrote, “and it becomes substance.”

I can’t decide if this sounds like an endorsement for extreme beer or an Onion headline.