The publication every beer blogger should buy

Last week Alan McLeod celebrated the arrival of Brewery History, No. 139 in his mail, because he already knew he’d find plenty of ideas inside. Sure enough, the mini-book immediately provoked a post. Don’t worry, there are plenty of ideas left, which is why every beer blogger should buy a copy (ordering information here). Not just for the post fodder, but because it is packed with essential beer journalism history.

I’m going to try to wait to mine it for blog posts until everybody gets their own copy, reads it through and perhaps quotes from it. It won’t be all that easy. I’m ready and rarin’ to riff on Zak Avery’s discourse on “A taste of beer,” as well as what Mark Dredge wrote about beer writing and new media.

And I particularly like J.R. Richards’ memories about time on the road with Jackson in his final years, a period when we (at least I) saw a lot less of him in the United States. It made me think of the tribute Martyn Cornell posted immediately after Jackson died.

It is Cornell’s discussion of Jackson and style that caught McLeod’s attention. As almost every time the S word comes up much discussion followed.

It made me haul out the the transcript of a wide-ranging conversation Jackson had with three New Mexico homebrewers in 1990, when they drove him from brewery to brewery and he collected information to update his Pocket Guide to Beer. (We didn’t live in New Mexico yet, but I ended up with the tapes.)

At one point Jackson said:

“It’s important that styles are defined. If styles aren’t defined you finish up once again with all beer tasting the same pretty much because a brewer . . . I mean Coors makes a nice Winterfest beer and they call it a stout beer in their adverting. That’s just confusing, you know, it’s not a stout, it’s sort of a festival style Vienna lager. If some terminology is not agreed upon in a beer or two, I mean if that terminology doesn’t mean something specific we just finish up with a confusion and blurring and in the end all beer tasting very similar once again. If it’s golden you call it a pilsner whether it’s hoppy or not. You decide everyone else is calling their beer pilsner so you’ll call your a Dortmunder even though there’s no difference.”

And almost as if he was acknowledging Stephen Beaumont’s comment 20 years before it was posted, he said, “It’s difficult how do you retain the integrity of styles without putting them into corsets essentially.”

Lots to think about. And, by the way, you don’t have to be a beer blogger to enjoy that little book full of ideas.

Brewing naked, ‘trading up’ and a ‘super boil’

Ancient recipe for beer

This is a “map cartouche of one of the Western Hemisphere’s earliest recorded recipes (for a form of beer).” It was taken from from America, a map by Jodocus Hondius (Amsterdam, 1606). Seems like a poster that would sell well in homebrew shops.

You’ll find it here, along with dozens of other images from the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and more about the growing American culinary history collection at the library.

* Trading up to beer (and then to wine). A working paper from the American Association of Wine Economists exams the evolution of beer consumption between countries and over time. Parts are easier to understand if you have an Economics to English dictionary at your side.

Although the focus is on economics, the authors look at all the factors that determine what makes a “beer drinking nation.” In doing so, they track how consumption in those nations has changed dramatically in the past 50 years and ask why. Their findings, in economic speak:

Our first important result is that we do indeed find an inverted-U shaped relation between income and per capita beer consumption in all pooled OLS ánd fixed effects specifications. From the pooled OLS regressions (Table 3), we find that countries with higher levels of income initially consume more beer. Yet, the second order coefficient on income is negative, indicating that from a certain income level onwards, higher incomes lead to lower per capita beer consumption. The first and second order effects for income are strongly significant and the coefficients are quite robust across the different specifications.

The fixed effects regression results confirm this (Table 4), so the non-linear relationship for income holds not only between countries, but also within individual countries over time. As a country becomes richer, beer consumption rises, but when incomes continue to grow, beer consumption starts to decline at some income level. We calculated the turning point, i.e. the point where beer consumption starts declining with growing incomes, to be approximately 22,000 US dollars per capita.

So you get a graph that looks like this, with beer sales soaring in emerging economies — quite obviously China, but also Russia, Brazil and India.

World beer consumption 1961-2007

What the wine economists want to know is “what’s next?” As consumers grow richer will they spend more money on wine (and less on beer)? The Chinese effect has already boosted prices of high-end French wines. Most predict something similar with wines across all prices categories, although that might be 20 years off.

What the study doesn’t consider at all is “beer different,” as in not a commodity, the beers drinkers are “trading up” to on a regular basis, in just about any country where they can find them.

* ‘Extreme’ boiling. Port Brewing/Lost Abbey has begun a “behind the scenes” video series, the first featuring how it makes Hot Rocks Lager. This is an Old World beer, certainly not “extreme.” But the process is a little out of the ordinary, and might just be what it looks like to make beer in Hell. Tomme Arthur calls it a “super boil,” and it is. Pay close attention beginning about 1:40 into the video.

 

Where in the beer world? 04.25.11

Where in the beer world?

We’ll see in the next few weeks if it is a good idea to revive “Where in the beer world?” Or if it turns into “Where in the hops world?” (Obviously not a problem this week.)

If you think you know where this photo was taken leave your answer as a comment. Of course, other comments remain welcome.

Beer or wine: Telling the truth a good place to start

Curious timing. Today Evan Benn (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) asks the question, “What’s in your beer? Labels should tell you.” And at the Wine Spectator website columnist Matt Kramer asks something that it turns out to be related: “If You Owned a Winery … What would you do differently?”

Benn looks at a government proposal for beer labels that small brewery owners don’t like. He’s not buying their objections. Good for him. Granted, it’s complicated, there may be issues I don’t know about and the whole “standard-drink” discussion confuses it further.

However, even though Kramer writes about wine, his discussion about labels is just a relevant to beer. Take a quick look at this photo (from shortly after La Cumbre Brewing in Albuquerque opened in December).

What's on tap at La Cumbre Brewing in Albuquerque

A lot of facts, stuff that a lot of people don’t care about. Ask the person pouring beer a question and he or she may provide even more information — about the ingredients, or about process, or just what the brewer was thinking. Again, stuff of interest to a relative few. But if you do want to know you can find out. Labels should provide useful information and honest stories. And QR codes further extend that opportunity.

Here’s the CliffNotes version of Kramer’s list. You should be able to figure out where to plug in the word beer.

* I Would Tell the Truth.
“This may seem overly simplistic. But I’m here to testify that it’s nothing less than astonishing to see the number of times a winery sidesteps, obfuscates, or flat-out lies about its practices in the winery or its reasons for pursuing a particular course of action.”

* I Would Speak Up.
“The key point is not to hamstring yourself, but rather differentiate yourself from those who want your artisanal image but are not willing to pay your price.”

* I Would Recognize That My Label Is Really a Portal.
“I would redesign it in recognition that the label is—or should be—an invitation to the prospective customer to acquire yet more information about what’s inside the bottle.”

* I Would Always Hire Wine People.
“There’s a trend, especially among very big wineries or small producers seeking to break into the luxury category, to hire people from fields other than wine.”

* I Would Ask Myself, “Am I A Me-Too Winery?”
“The only way to become above-average is to impose a demand that what you offer is indeed superior.”

Greg Koch = Jerry Lee Lewis or Lindsay Lohan?

Midweek catching up (from various blogs and press releases):

  • Stone Brewing beers arrived in Missouri this week and you’d think there was a royal wedding about. Stone co-founder Greg Koch was signing bottles and such yesterday in Kansas City and makes a similar splash in St. Louis tomorrow.

    Leading to this fabulous sentence from the KC Beer Blog: “If you’re not aware of Greg Koch, you will be. He’s the Jerry Lee Lewis to Sam Calagione’s Pat Boone, or for a more current reference, he’s Lindsay Lohan to Calagione’s Raven Symone.”

  • Vanberg and Dewulf will begin importing a beer called Monk’s Stout from Brasserie Dupont later this year. It seems Dupont also brewed this beer in the 1950s. Which explains why we came across this case in the window of a Brussels beer shop in 2008:

    DuPont Monk's Stout

  • Alan’s question of the week: Why Is Britain Creating Beer Blogging Celebrities? As he writes, and we’ve witnessed here, discussions about beer writing often may help cure insomnia. But give it a look anyway.
  • The publican as writer. Where does such a being fit in? I have printed copies of the newsletter Roger Baylor used to assemble squirreled away somewhere, from the days when beer writing intended to satisfy your soul came via postal carrier instead of an rss feed. He notes he’s founder of Rich O’s Public House at the top of his blog, The Potable Curmudgeon, but now he also runs a brewery.

    So that’s the background. And here’s a bit of what he had to write in “Avery joins flight from Indiana; Publican yawns.”

    You could hear the sounds of furtive sourcing as shelves emptied of valuable brands. The wails of lamentation kept me awake at night as craft beer fans weaned on the tender mercies of Beer Advocate and Rate Beer vented their despair.

    They should have been asking: Should one’s go-to beer come from another time zone?

    And: Your forefathers had it far tougher, whiner.

    Me? I shrugged, yawned and filled a growler of fresh local beer.

    There’s more, of course, because he has to guide his story to its closing lines: “Just remember: I used to walk ten miles in waist-deep snow just to score a six-pack of Sierra. Your troubles are miniscule by comparison.”

  • Was I snoozing when this was was announced? Stone Brewing has a page where you can report “out of code” beer, that is beer that isn’t as fresh a Stone’s brewers would like it to be when you drink it. Most of the regular beers should be consumed within 90 days.