Cinco de Mayo and beer as art

Miller ChillI’m beginning to realize there is a chance I will break down and try Miller Chill. Got to be curious, right? Check out the number of posts at Beer Therapy. Somebody is feeling the passion.

Saturday is Cinco de Mayo and since I can’t be in San Diego for the Port/Lost Abbey Anniversary Party (you can read brewer Tomme Arthur’s thoughts on the first year here) perhaps I can take the lead from an excellent column by Peter Rowe in The San Diego Union-Tribune about Chil, Mexican micheladas and Mexican beer in general.

Just so you know, you make a michelada by pouring two or three fingers of lime juice into a salt-rimmed glass before blending in a some beer – to your personal taste. Most often it is garnished with lime, but you could use lemon and you might add some hot sauce. Miller Chill is already flavored with lime and salt.

Rowe reveals that Mexican brewers are not fans of michelada.

“They don’t like them,” said Juan Ramon Vera Martinez, public relations coordinator for Cervecer­a Tecate.

There are two schools of thought here, each worth pondering as we approach Cinco de Mayo. One school views brewers as artists. The notion that bartenders can “improve” artworks with a splash or a sprinkle is heresy. It’s like distributing Magic Markers at the Louvre’s entrance. Hey, kids, let’s improve the “Mona Lisa”!

The other school, though, is not alarmed. Why fuss about beer, one of life’s simple pleasures?

Yes, great brewers are master craftsmen. Their work is sublime – but also plentiful. If you “spoil” the occasional liquid masterwork with a shot of citrus juice, don’t worry. Pristine beer is available by the truckload.

Beer as art? Brewers as artists?

That’s a topic for another day (tomorrow) and good enough excuse to hold off buying Miller Chill.

The Session # 3 cometh: Think Mild

The SessionDon’t forget to stock up on some Mild ale for Friday.

What’s Mild, you ask, and why Friday?

Jay Brooks tells us everything we need to know about the elusive style. May is “Mild Month” in the UK and Friday is Mild day for a monthly virtual gathering of beer bloggers that we call The Session.

If you are a blogger we welcome you to join us – just post on Friday and send Jay a link. If you are a beer drinker, then lay in some Mild or have one (or two, that’s the advantage of low alcohol beers) at your local pub, then join us for a little reading.

You don’t have to drink that beer ice cold

Coldest beer in town

This month at World of Beer, Stephen Beaumont takes on ice cold beer. I’m not going to repeat what he has written, so please read it first. I just have one more suggestion (OK, I have more but will keep it to one), and although Mr. B. maintains two blogs WoB isn’t one of them. Otherwise I could just leave the idea as a comment.

He writes that “it’s almost impossible in the United States these days to be served a beer in a non-frosted glass” and suggests sending the glass back.

I propose preemptive action. Watch the bartender pour a beer and see if he or she is hauling out iced mugs. If so, there’s a good chance that every clean mug is on ice (yes – I’ve seen bartenders follow a request for a warm mug by pouring beer into a dirty one).

So ask for your beer in a large wine glass (something for Cabarnets or Pinot Noirs). They probably don’t keep those cold. If you are drinking from a bottle you can just pour in part of the beer, allowing it to warm if the bottle’s been on ice.

This isn’t perfect. The glass will treat some beers better than others – but since the ice cold mug was probably a beer unfriendly shaker glass there’s a good chance you’ll be ahead.

And if the wine glasses are frosted? Go to another place to drink.

New Beer Rule #3: 2 pints are better than one

NEW BEER RULE #3: You must drink at least two servings of a beer before you pass judgment on it.

Good tasting, huh?I starting writing the rule before this wandering conversation at Seen Through a Glass, but it makes a great point. In the middle there is a discussion about how, or if, drinkers come to appreciate a range of beer flavors.

My answer: Pay attention.

At first I was going to propose only a single serving (that size may vary according to style). However, George Reisch of Anheuser-Busch suggests a “three pint rule” when he speaks at beer dinners. Several years ago Brooklyn Brewery’s Garrett Oliver put forward a “Four-Pint Principle” to other brewers.

Oliver explained he means “that I want the customer to WANT to have four pints of this beer.” Circumstances may dictate otherwise but he or she should want to continue drinking that beer. Oliver was speaking to brewers, telling them they needed to get out and drink their beer where other people drink.

“Just before the end of every pint, every customer makes a decision – ‘Will I have another one of these?'”

A commercial brewer got me thinking about the rule when he wrote this in an e-mail:

“My favorite rating of all time goes something like this. I went to X festival where I proceeded to drink 4 ounce samples of everything they had 55 beers in all over a 4-6 hour period. Right about the time I was set to go home, some guy broke out this beer that I (really wanted). I was so late to the bottle opening that I got only an ounce of dregs from the 4-year-old bottle of bottle conditioned and unfiltered beer. God, it was the best one-ounce tasting in my life. I can still remember seeing the light at the end of the tunnel after swallowing it…. Or it could have been that I drank so much before and I was seeing Jesus himself? Either way, I give it 19 out of 20 and it would have been a perfect score but I had trouble with its ‘clarity.'”

You can understand why he OK’d using this, but without his name. He likes the beer rating sites and appreciates they’ve been good for his business. But he knows that customers buy growlers where he works, go home to hand bottle the beer, then ship it all over the country. He knows enthusiasts will split beer into tiny portions to share with friends.

That’s not the way he intended his beer to be enjoyed. (OK, when a consumer buys the beer it becomes her property, but we’re getting the beer we do today because brewers put some of themselves into the product.)

Yes, I know that judges at the Great American Beer Festival or World Beer Cup only sample a few ounces in deciding which are the “best” beers.

No, this isn’t a screed against beer community sites – I’ve written before about how vital they are to the beer revolution. And I’d still tell you assigning a score to a beer for anything other than personal use is silly even if you guaranteed you’d drink 10 servings first.

This is a rule for your personal use.

Reserving judgment isn’t going to make a great beer taste mediocre, nor a boring one suddenly take on nuance. Reserving judgment means paying attention throughout – whether it is a beer high in alcohol, low in alcohol, high in hops, low in hops, malt forward, malt backward, yeast dominated, yeast sublimated. What’s the rest of the story?

You might be surprised what you learn. Besides you got nothin’ to lose. I’m giving you a reason to have another beer.

NEW BEER RULE #2: A beer consumer should not be allowed to drink a beer with IBU higher than her or his IQ.

NEW BEER RULE #1: When you open a beer for a vertical tasting and there is rust under the cap it’s time to seriously lower your expectations for what’s inside the bottle.

British beer drinkers young and hip

New research into Britain’s drinking habits finds “Beer is the drink of style and sophistication.”

We might as well get the grain-of-salt stuff out of the way first. This research was commissioned by the British Guild of Beer Writers, who have good reason to suggest that newspapers run more stories about beer. And Pete Brown, author of two popular books about beer, founded Storm Lantern, the consulting firm that did the research.

Stylish beer drinkerSo you are entitled to think this carries the same sort of authority as the recent report funded by MySpace that found MySpace is a great marketing platform. Personally, I favor giving credit to the guild for trying to change the image of beer (sound familiar?) and to think that similar research in the United States would show that there’s a good-sized market for stories of a beery nature.

Speaking for the report, Brown said: “This research proves emphatically that having an enthusiastic appreciation of beer is mainstream – most of the people drinking specialty beers and real ales do so not because they’re beer geeks, but because they are more discerning about all food and drink.”

The report found:

– There are over seven million “beer fans” in the UK – “people who drink beer, but also drink a wide variety of beer styles (i.e. not just lager), seek out new beers and are prepared to pay more for quality.”
– Beer enthusiasts are young, upmarket, affluent and well-educated (55% aged 18-44).
– They are mainly male (but still include half a million women).
– They are voracious readers of quality newspapers and magazines, very interested in news and current affairs, travel sections, anything to do with new cars and gadgets.
– They are bon viveurs, passionate about food and drink, frequently entertaining at home if they are not in a pub or restaurant. They are inquisitive about food, but uninterested in low fat, fads and health scares.

Tim Hampson, chairman of the British Guild of Beer Writers, said: “The research buries the myth that only wine is the drink of sophistication.Beer is not only an equal to wine, it clearly deserves greater serious coverage by the media “especially among those papers trying to appeal to people in the 25-44 age group.”

In fact, there has been a lot of hand wringing among those who sell wine about how beer is doing a better job attracting the so-called Millennials (sometimes known as Gen Y). Beer, wine and Millennials is topic for another post.

Instead, let’s hope that if there’s a similar survey in the states that it finds that however the group of “beer fans” is defined it includes more than 1 out of 14 (a half million out of seven million) women. Otherwise doesn’t sound like much fun to me.