Book learning: fruity, peach = ethyl octanoate

As mentioned Monday, when asked to contribute a list of “best books” to a new-ish book recommendation website I chose five related to aroma and flavor. You can see my picks here.

Whether the books did or did not specifically mention beer mattered little when I made the selections. However, since you are here for the beer, a couple of beer-related excerpts.

First, from Luca Turin in “The Emperor of Scent.”

“Look at beer, which is a very interesting cultural product. Beer smells like a burp. Gasses from someone’s stomach. Lovely. Again a product of fermentation, which is to say decay. Decay enhances smells and flavors, yet we have a sharp ability to identify decay, because decaying things will kill you. Bacterial and yeast decomposition.

“Which can give you ‘I wouldn’t touch that in a million years’ and, at the same time and in the same culture, mind you, ‘I will pay great sums to consume Rodenbach,’ which is a miracle of a beer from Belgium. A miraculous, powdery apple flavor. Those Rodenbach yeast have an I.Q. of at least two hundred. Fucking genius yeast.”

Second, a rather simple* table from “Nose Dive,” which really is the field guide the full title promises.

Table from "Nose Dive"

* Simple compared, for instance, to the one for “pungent spices: mustards and peppers.”

If you click around the site you will see each entry includes a “closely related book lists.” It pleases me that the one list related to mine is from Gordon Shepherd, since one of his books is among the five I point to. But, dang, I wish there were more lists related to aroma and flavor.

Monday. Beer links. Trends & lifestyles.

Still not commenting about the Monster Deal. Still can’t get away from navel gazing (final 3 links).

DRINKS FOR BETTY
Over the years patrons started buying drinks for Betty White in the case that she ever returned to Mineral Point, Wisconsin.

THEN CAME MARCH 2020
From the Zenne Valley.

TRENDS
A half dozen. Smoked lager?

LIFESTYLES
– Beer.
– Wine.

LIFESTYLES II
In that first link directly above, Jeff Alworth writes beer is “an everyman (everyperson?) drink.” I would argue craft beer is not. (Please settle for this for now.)

It is good marketing to portray it as a working person’s drink, calling on images of laborers enjoying beer at the end of a shift. Consider this evocative sentence: “There would be twenty or thirty men either sitting on a grass bank of leaning against a wooden fence drinking and chatting before working and when the morning shift came up from work, some of them would buy a drink and stand or sit in the lane before going home.” But when we buy into that nostalgia, it might be best to stop and consider what we are longing for.

CYMBOSPONDYLUS YOUNGORUM
First, a beer was named for a fossil. Later, a species was named for the maker of the beer.

AROMA & FLAVOR
A newish site (still in beta) called “Shepard: Discover the Best Books” asked me to contribute to their list of “best books.” They might have been expecting 5 beer books, but instead I suggested 5 about aroma and flavor. More about the picks Wednesday.

COUNTERPOINT
Jeff Alworth on the state of beer blogging and media. “Grandpa’s old blog may seem peripheral to the media world—though by my reading this couldn’t be more wrong.”

NO COMMENT(S)
A wonderful post from Beth Demmon about the evolution of her personal bucket list would seem to be the sort of blogging Alworth is defending. But there is no opportunity to comment. I guess you have to do that on Twitter.

AN ALTERNATIVE
Why create a subscription site? Because it gives value to writing. Despite this view that all things creative are done simply for passion, writing about wine has a cost whether that’s travel, research, books, education, or just one’s time.

ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE

#nottwitter 04

Can somebody point me to a blog post, an academic paper, something from the New York Times, wherever, that provides insight into what might be called unhealthy nostaglia and the ramifications? And how might it relate tradition as a trap?

Because this:

And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’

Fog

Perhaps the wires in my brain simply got crossed this week. I have no interest in commenting on the news after news after news related to the business of beer that just keeps coming. (Take a look at Brewbound and keep scrolling if you think you missed something. Or, if you recently did something you feel you should be punished for, go directly to Beer Twitter.)

Instead my thoughts keep going back to June of 2020, when economists Lester Jones (National Beer Wholesalers Association) and Bart Watson (Brewers Association) discussed what was going on with beer sales only a few months after the world shut down. Jones planted this seed:

“When you look how the brewing industry has evolved . . . in that 2008, 2010 recession we saw a lot of different business models. We saw people who were a little bit more of the taproom model, where they wanted to be small, they wanted to be local. They had certain business models they were pursuing. Then you had players who were a little more lifestyle oriented, and they were the guys working on their second careers. They were doing it for a lifestyle versus other people who were doing it for a living.

“I think at this point we’re going to see a division in the industry as the people who were in it for the lifestyle of having a small little brewpub in a local community versus the people who were in there with the intentions of growing a real brewing business, widely distributed, with a widely recognized brand. These two business models are going to split off. This is the event that will do it.”

The beer business and culture. Culture and the beer business. Can they be separated?