No more free beer for mommy bloggers either

Catching up on several things, some beer and some more broadly food and drink.

– Alan has fun with the news the Federal Trade Commission has ruled bloggers must disclose “conflicts of interest.” Does this mean, as Alan suggests, no more free beer for bloggers? Looks like the FTC may have bigger game in mind, like “mommy bloggers” and hype on Twitter and Facebook.

– Real Ale sales in England are up according to The Cask Report: Britain’s National Drink. Pretty big deal in a down market. Pete Brown wrote the report. Lots to read, but I was struck by a fact he added in his blog: cask still sells at a lower price than most beers on the bar. Curious, given that in the United States a cask beer generally costs more.

– Condé Nast will close Gourmet magazine. Perhaps they should have been writing more about beer.

– Inside Beer, from UK beer writer Jeff Evans, is up and running.

– The $795 wine tasting. And that was just to get in. People traveled from all over the country to taste wine with Robert Parker. How many did he correctly identify in the blind tasting? Some debate if he was zero for 15 or 1 for 15.

 

Session #32 wrapped up, #33 announced

The SessionI plead work. Unfortunately I missed round 32 of The Session, but Girl Likes Beer has the roundup.

Meanwhile Andy Couch has announced the topic for No. 33 will be Framing Beer. The explanation is a little complicated, and you might want to read the whole thing, but here are a few of the options:

Relate an amusing or optimistic anecdote about introducing someone to strange beer. Comment on the role a label plays in framing a beer or share a label-approval related story. I have not done much blind tasting, and I would be intrigued to hear about this “frameless” evaluation of beer.

I hope to be there Nov. 6.

 

Portland Beer Price Index – way cool

“The average price of a six-pack of Oregon craft beer in Southeast Portland is $8.85. A 22-ounce bomber averages $4.90, and 16 ounces of quality draft beer will typically set you back $4.27.”

From the first Portland Beer Price Index posted by It’s Pub Night.

The plan is to do this quarterly. Wouldn’t you like to see one of these for every city, or at least every region?

I’m not sure why I added It’s Pub Night to my rss subscriptions — either via Twitter or Beervana — but it was a lucky addition indeed.

 

‘Signature’ beers versus signature character

Signature beersOne more thought roused by Mark Dredge’s “New Wave” post. If you lined up a bunch of beers, some of which you might never have tasted, and drank them “blind” could you pick out the brewery they were from?

I ask this because Dredge wrote, “each with their own authoritative stamp which makes the drinker know that they’ve just enjoyed a beer by that particular brewery.”

I’m not simply talking about if you recognize a particular beer, so it’s a little tricky. You have to be pretty familiar with a brewery’s work to play this game so naturally you’ll know some beers. Let’s say Racer 5 and Hop Rod Rye from Bear Republic. But when you try two other beers from the brewery do you think you’d say, “Ah, Bear Republic?”

Another example would be Lagunitas Brewing, known for its “C” beers (crystal malts and hops that begin with the letter “c”). Or Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales, America’s leading example of why somebody should invent a good name for what might otherwise be called beer terroir.

This is different than the notion of a signature beer. For instance, you can easily pick out New Glarus Wisconsin Belgian Red in a crowd. I’d call that a signature beer. It helped make New Glarus Brewing famous, but Spotted Cow accounts for half of sales and the new and wonderful Crack’d Wheat tastes totally different from those two.

So does New Glarus have an authoritative stamp? Bear Republic, Lost Abbey, Russian River, Rogue*, Goose Island, [fill in the name of the brewery of your choice]? Or what about the star of Dredge’s post, Dogfish Head?

* Added just for Jeff Alworth. Oh, and here’s one more, Pelican Pub & Brewery.