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Wikio Beer Blog rankings for May
This month it falls on me to preview the Wikio Beer Blog (U.S.) rankings for May, which are based on April (and perhaps months before) social activity.
I considered an alternative headline, like ‘BROOKSTON BEER BULLETING RETURNS TO TOP” or “APPELLATION BEER CONTINUES TO FALL” or “OAKSHIRE BREWING – WTF?” But those who care about the rankings just want to see them and the rest of you have already moved on. Here they are with the tiniest bit of news to follow.
No need to revisit the various conversations that sprung up when Wikio first began ranking U.S. beer blogs, so instead some news.
Washington Beer Blog, which dropped from No. 8 to No. 11 this month, and Blog About Beer are among the six finalists for Saveur magazine’s Best Wine or Beer Blog. The other four are wine blogs. It’s something of a popularity contest, with voting to begin May 12.
There are more than a dozen categories, and I find it interesting that the last one listed is “Best Professional Blog.”
What does that say about the rest of us?
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’
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.
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
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.