No, beer is the poor cousin

Some things are a matter of perspective.

At Wine Sediments, Andrew Barrow asks “Why do newspapers treat wine like poor cousin?”

He’s talking about wine coverage in the UK. On the other hand, during a recent visit to London, Peter Haydon of Meantime Brewing talked about how little coverage beer receives in newspapers despite the fact that it accounts for 80% of alcohol sales in England.

“There’s a huge amount of snobbery against beer,” said. “If you open the Sunday paper it’s wine, wine, wine.”

Gooden apparently isn’t lamenting how much is written, but what.

Why is it that these magazines seem fine to review a restaurant with the final bill coming in at £60+ (US$110) per head, but the wine column on the same page is suggesting £3.99 or £4.99 (sub US$10) wines?

He’s not talking just about restaurants. He points to a story that “recommends a beauty cream that retails for £56 a tub and an eye-shadow at £15 (US$27)” while noting that wine writers mostly stick to suggesting lower prices wines.

Then he asks a more complicated question:

Restaurant reviews are often “bad.” [To summarize, wine reviews seldom are.]

In fact I don’t think I have ever read a poor wine review. They are always positive. Perhaps the limited copy space for the humble wine writer restricts them to writing up the good stuff.

Why are wine and wine critics dealt with so differently from other critics in newspapers?

Good question, and probably one that should be asked about beer as well.

The vocabulary of tasting

The tasting of lambics previously promised by the New York Times arrived today. Well worth your time.

Discussions about the article already include many more words than are in it. A few:

Burgundian Baggle Belt.

Rate Beer.

Beer Advocate.

At the Babble Belt there’s also side conversation about the use of wine vocabulary in a beer story, and the question pops ups, “Are we validated by them (wine snobs), or are we secure in what we know to be some of the greatest flavors and complexity of any beverage?”

That’s a fair question. The short answer would be, no, we shouldn’t feel validated just because a wine writer pens something nice about beer.

However, language is another matter. Those who try to describe beer in technical terms reserved for wine – and the Times article certainly does not – should be made fun of. But well used vocabulary is well used vocabulary.

Firestone Walker brewmaster Matt Brynildson discussed this recently. Firestone Walker is located in Paso Robles, Calif., in the midst of scores of wineries. After the winery tasting rooms close at 5 p.m., wine tourists and winery workers often congregate at the brewery tasting room, which is open until 7 p.m.

“The wine world has an incredible vocabulary,” Brynildson said. “They seem to conjure up more of a food vocabulary.

“A lot of brewers pick it part by just talking about the technical characteristics.”

(I can certainly be guilty of that. The other day a brewer mentioned he was tasting a Belgian-brewed tripel. “Good beer,” I said, “but it could use more hops.” What I should have said is that I would like it better if it were a bit more dry, with a touch of bitterness to balance the beer’s sweetness.)

“I learn a lot when I drink beer with winemakers,” Brynildson said. “They talk about it and look at it from a different angle.”

That’s why even if you already know all you want to about lambics you should be sure to check out Lambics: Beers Gone Wild. You’ll still learn something.

Well done beer and food reporting

OK, if we’re going to pick on newspapers when they don’t do a great job of reporting about beer, it seems fair to also give credit to ones that do.

Cheers to the StatesmanJournal in Salem, Ore.

Rather than settling for a routine advance on the Blooms & Brews Brewfest, reporter Angela Yeager wrotes a story about how to match beer and food, complete with lots of tips.

Beer needs more beat reporters

Sometimes, actually many times, Lew Bryson should call his monthly post The Rant rather than The Buzz. In a piece titled Just Like Wine he tackles the bias food writers/editors’ have toward wine over beer and newspapers’ general “gee whiz” attitude toward beer.

This latter atttidue served breweries well enough a decade ago, when a new brewery was opening somewhere in the United States every few days. “Clark, go down and write a story about the new brewery in town. It’s a national trend. Take Jimmy along for a few photos.” Everybody got full blown feature, but many never saw another.

I’ve read plenty of these stories framed on the walls at brewpubs and brewery tasting rooms. They tend to be formulatic, based on information the reporter could acquire in a short time, a little bit about the brewing process, reciting the figures about how many breweries there once were in America, trying to capture a little of the romance of having a local brewery, etc.

There wasn’t time for the reporter to learn much about the intriguing subject of beer. Newspapers reserve “beats” – the stuff they cover regularly like the local school board, police, city hall, the college athletic teams – for topics of vital community interest.

When a newspaper does offer regular coverage of beer it’s usually because of a passionate reporter on another beat putting in much of his or her own time. For example, Travis Poling in San Antonio.

But to return to where Lew started, with a story in the Philadelphia Inqurier. Large newspapers, and certainly magazines, have the resources to permit reporters to “do the job right.” It’s a win-win situation for newspapers. The simple word beer makes people smile and want to read on, and there are thousands more interesting things to right about in America than there were 10 years ago.

Lew concludes:

Open challenge to Inquirer food editor Maureen Fitzgerald: run a beer piece that’s as in-depth and detailed as you would expect a wine piece to be. Give it your best shot. The New York Times’s Eric Asimov is doing it already, and Philly is twice the beer city NYC is. This is the biggest market for Belgian beers in the country, Victory and Dogfish Head are two of the hottest breweries in the country, and what do we hear about it in the Inquirer? We don’t hear diddley. Step up.

You might ask the same of your local newspaper.

How cool are these cool beers?

I think the old saying goes that any publicity is good publicity.

So is an article that first appeared at Forbes.com and then go picked up by Yahoo automatically good because it focused on beers that are not industrial lagers?

Spirited debate erupted on several beer discussion boards about just this.

If you pick just one post to read – and by typing that I’m obviously taking sides in this argument – make it one from Bob Johnston at the Burgundiean Babble belt.