Well I give up all my sculpturing
‘Cause my life had gone all sad
An I went to work down at the factory
It weren’t art … but it weren’t bad
So
They put me on the assembly line
Putting plastic leaves on the plastic palms
Then they shipped then off the Los Angeles
Yeah it weren’t art … but it weren’t wrong
Now some say it’s pathetic
When you give up your aesthetic
For a blue collar job in the factory
But all that exhibiting
Was just too damn inhibiting
For a beer drinking
Regular guy … like me

                    – Terry Allen, Oui

A couple of years ago I asked a few brewers attending the Craft Brewers Conference to choose one of four words to describe themselves: artist, artisan, engineer or farmer.

There’s another part to this. If you think your favorite brewer is an artist does it follow that some beers must be art? A great beer, a wonderful dish or an excellent bottle of wine may be aesthetically pleasing as art, but that’s not the same as being an object of art.

Does it seem like a stretch to call these art?

I got to thinking about Terry Allen’s lyrics because I’m writing a lot about process while working on the wheat beer book. The way I see it there is a rather wide gap between the skill need to put “plastic leaves on plastic palms” and to put consistently good beer in a glass. Just not sure how you describe that skill.

I didn’t ask Bernard Kuhn, brewmaster at Weissbräu Freilassing in southeastern Germany, if he’d call his beer art, but I’m pretty sure the answer would have been no. Kuhn brews three regular weiss beers and one winter special, no flavors of the month, following quite traditional methods (decoction, open fermentation, true bottle conditioning). But what he talks about first is quality.

“You cannot always do the same process,” he said. “You have to brew good beer out of shitty malt. That’s the skill of the brewmaster.”

Is the art in what a brewer actually does in the process or end result, in neither, in both?

Random travel note: Today we’re off to Archer City, Texas, to wander through the multiple buildings of Booked Up, the antiquarian book store operated by author Larry McMurtry. This could be dangerous.

A canary in a coal mine?

Jeff Alworth has been trying to figure out how the recession is influencing craft beer sales. My gut feeling is that he’s on to something.

Look, I’m not predicting that a bunch of craft breweries are going to go out of business, but stories like this one, “Craft brew sales on the rise as more offbeat beer flavors hit Superbowl coolers,” seem a little too good to be true.

When you look at all the things people aren’t buying these days it would hardly be surprising to see a luxury, affordable or not, like craft beer on the list.

Yes, I’ve seen the reports from many brewers who say they are still in expansion mode, who are having trouble keeping up with orders. Is this, in economist-speak, a leading indicator or a lagging indicator?

Guess we’ll find out soon enough.

I really shouldn’t admit how fascinating I find most of the numbers Ron Pattinson assembles.

The particular series that has me on the edge of my seat right now are the posts like these: assessing beer quality and Barclay Perkins Porter and Stout quality in the 1920’s.

These provide some hint if quality was a reason some styles, and some specific brands, survived at various points in time and why some didn’t.

I just wish somebody could find tasting notes to go with them. (Isn’t going to happen.)