Mid-week beer links and observations

“Everything’s going up.”

Bill Night updates his Portland Beer Price Index. “Two pubs raised their draft prices this quarter, and the six-pack and bomber prices are not surprisingly continuing an upward trend.”

I’m pretty sure it’s not just happening in Portland,Oregon.

* Speaking of beer prices, SaveOnBrew.com is an interesting notion but right now appears to be more useful when shopping for a deal on Stag rather than where to find Goose Island IPA and how much it might cost. What direction will it grow?

* The neighborhood pub. Several worthy ideas at the KC Beer Blog and one comment that I have to pass along: “I haven’t met a bar that managed to infect the bottles yet.” But they can subject them to lighting that skunks the beer inside (even brown bottles) or fail to rotate stock or otherwise keep it fresh.

* The Farmery will be Canada’s first estate brewery. Challenges ahead, as nicely summarized in the Winnipeg Free Press: “They’re betting the farm on estate brewery.”

* A press release announcing a new brewery for Los Angeles, Golden Road Brewing (actually in North Atwater Village), explains it will be laid out in a three-building campus. “The distinctive primary colored buildings are easy to spot, just off Interstate 5 and Highway 134. The blue building will be production, the red building will be barrel room & storage and the yellow building will be for offices, on-site sales, and eventually a pub and beer garden.” It’s supposed to open in the fall. Personally, I figure if you are going to go to the trouble of color coding your buildings you might as well have them change with the seasons.

*Merchant du Vin, one of the first distributors of specialty beers to launch a web site (like maybe pre-Google), has redesigned its site. Pretty easy to find the basic specs on any of it’s beers. More impressive: “Find Our Beer” actually works.

* Yuengling wasn’t already in Ohio? That’s a bet I would have lost. Apparently Ohio residents still drive to the Pennsylvania border to buy the beer.

* Just plain stupid. Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery in Ontario claims Alpha-fornication contains “2500 IBUs (International Bitterness Units) and 13.3% ABV.” That’s about 2,400 bitterness units beyond possible.

Making a connection, beer included

Jake Leinenkugel autographs a fan's head?

Chippewa Falls, Wis., is a town with about 13,000 residents. Drive in from the north, taking County Highway S to county Highway Q, turning south and driving past a couple of big parks and it doesn’t look that much different than Cameron on Bloomer or one of the other towns along U.S. 3. Maybe a little bigger.

Next, boom, a brewery complex, Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Co.

It’s a tourist attraction, for sure, and good for the town’s business. However it feels perfectly appropriate that the gift shop/museum may be new (much newer than other parts of the brewery) but is designed to look like a cabin from the nineteenth century and called Leinie Lodge.

Saturday Leinenkuegl’s hosted its eighth annual Leinie Lodge Family Reunion. Thousands attended. I expect many spoke with a distinctive northern Wisconsin/Minnesota accent (think Frances McDormand in “Fargo.”) And a PR person sent along this photo of Jake Leinenkugel autographing one attendee’s head.

You think it was staged? I don’t.

But I’m pretty sure that the man did not immediately tweet, “@jakeleinenkugel just signed my head. I may never wash it again.”

Where in the beer world? 06.20.11

Where in the beer world?

Think you know where in the beer world this photo was taken?

Please leave your answer as a comment.

This is a really easy one. And I think there’s every chance I’ve posted this photo before. Maybe even in this category. But there’s a reason I wanted to post it (perhaps again). I’ll explain tomorrow.

The smell of the ocean . . . stinks in beer

This isn’t exactly new. Live Science explained that the key had been found to the “smell of the sea” more than four years ago, but it appears I was absent that day. Instead, the basics just popped up in an audio book Daria is listening to.

And it turns out dimethyl sulfide, otherwise known as DMS, gives the ocean air “sort of a fishy, tangy smell.” Good when you are strolling along the beach. Not so good in beer, other than at very low levels in a few and full on in Rolling Rock. If you are judging beer you might comment DMS causes a sample to smell and taste of canned or cooked vegetables.

Not surprisingly, some people find it reminds them of shellfish. Recently I judged beers with somebody who said one tasted just like SpaghettiOs.

So let’s say you and a friend order the same beer. You notice DMS and hold your nose. He remembers the night he proposed to his future wife on a beach in Jamaica.

Context. It matters.

The line between appreciation and compulsion

In the final minutes of “BEERTICKERS: Beyond the ale” documentary filmmaker Phil Parkin announces he still has some unfinished business.

When he began making this movie had no aspiration to be Morgan Spurlock (the protagonist in “Super Size Me”). “I never actually intended to be in the film,” he wrote in an email, “but became so ingrained in the content that I felt the viewer needed someone different, a non-ticker, to lead them through.” He set a goal to reach 500 ticks, and at the outset of the Sheffield Beer Festival he has 472.

Drinking No. 473 he talks about the lessons he has learned, but by No. 479 he is looking a little dazed as he wonders if friends who are to meet him will show up. And I’m thinking, “Dude, don’t do it.” Twenty-eight half pints (the “official” size for ticking as champion ticker Brian Moore explains at the beginning) amounts to about two gallons of beer even if you get a few short pours in there. This does not seem like a good idea.

In fact, his friends do arrive, it gets dark and the organizers call time after Parkin orders No. 492.

“Yes, I drank far too much that day, we arrived at 2 p.m. and I didn’t leave until around 12 or 1 a.m. if I remember correctly,” he wrote. “Much of that footage didn’t make the final cut. I drank far too much. Eek.”

The documentary started out to be an examination of beerticking, also known as scooping, a hobby he viewed as akin to trainspotting. It turned out to be about UK drinking culture, real ale and pubs. About a culture and people easy to care about. Maybe this makes me a hardass, but when Spurlock kept ordering to excess in “Super Size Me” I felt no empathy toward him.

When Parkin looked at his clock at 1:50 on morning and realized feeling like shit was part of the process my head also hurt. And who wouldn’t want to have a pint in a pub with Mick the Tick, listening to him play in a skiffle band in the pub where ticking may well have started?

British beer culture comes off all the better because this was not shot through a gaussian lens. Mick the Tick staggers a bit from time to time, and Dave Unpronounceable and Gazza (two of the other ticking principals) have a few rough edges.

Parkin gets a little rah-rah goofy when he visits the Thornbridge Brewery and helps brew a beer, but it works because by then he has begun to consider the difference between appreciation and accumulation. “I could have only one (beer). I wondered if it bothered the other beer tickers,” he comments before going on to the next tick.

In an email he reiterated that ticking doesn’t necessarily include keeping tasting notes, and for some “it’s all about the numbers. Quite sad in some cases as the appreciation of beer goes out of the window.”

Perhaps. But listening to Mick the Tick talk about beer I don’t really care if he can tell me if tick No. 24,612 tasted like fresh oranges on a June evening or brussel sprouts. As Parkin’s images illustrate so well, in the pub friendship, sharing and community are as important as the beer itself.

******

You can find copies of “BEERTICKERS: Beyond the Ale” here and here.