There is no mention of beer in this love letter to the sense of smell.
If the five senses were a boy band, smell would certainly be the least popular member. This is not news: Some of the most influential philosophers in Western history turned up their noses at olfaction. “Man can smell things only poorly,” Aristotle declared, deeming our noses inaccurate sense organs. Immanuel Kant called smell “the most dispensable” of our senses, citing its fleeting nature as the reason “it does not pay to cultivate it or refine it.” Centuries later, a study conducted by the marketing company McCann Worldgroup would reveal that more than half of the 16-to-22-year-olds they interviewed would rather give up their sense of smell than technology.
But without our sense of smell there would be no pleasure in drinking beer.
Great Good Places
Could this happen? I hope so. In his Fingers substack Dave Infante draws our attention to what he calls ThirdPlacesTok. It took a lot less than two years of zoom happy hours to establish face-to-screen interactions are not the same as settling in face-to-face, preferably in friendly establishment. The point is not that ThirdPlacesTok might replace our favorite “great good place” (to cite the title of Ray Oldeburg’s book), but that they introduce a new generation to the importance of third places. And this: “Remaking the American civic landscape to preserve the third places we have and build new ones (ideally where commerce is a secondary focus, or not a focus at all) will be impossible without a massive, small-d democratic groundswell of demand.”
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Another love story (Brasserie de la Senne Zinnir). “It looked cool, it tasted cooler: it was the first time I’d found a beer that was a bit of me. It tasted modern, in its hoppy aroma and bracing bitterness, while having a distinctly ‘Belgian’ edge in its spiciness. I fell in love, so much so that what Zinne did for me is something that I hope to do for everyone who drinks my brewery, Solvay Society, beers now – to change their perception of ‘Belgian beer.'”
The other Oktoberfest. Germany’s second largest Oktoberfest, the Cannstatter Volksfest, attracts more than 4 million visitors to Stuttgart over the course of 17 days. Plenty of details and photos from Franz Hofer. We went in 2008 (photo here was taken then) and now I am wondering if festivalgoers still dance to “YMCA” on table tops and sing “Take Me Home Country Roads” at the top of their voices. I wrote a bit about the day for All About Beer magazine (god bless the return of the archives).
Festival, what festival? Yes, you could spend the week in Denver, drink hundreds of different beers from breweries all over the country and never step a foot inside the Great American Beer Festival.
The power of the story. Feel free to replace the word “wine” with “beer” each time you see it in a story. “Priming is a psychological phenomenon in which exposure to one stimulus influences how we respond to a subsequent, related stimulus—consider the high-decibel music that is often played during a sports game to energize the crowd and athletes. Studies show that if a wine is presented with a formidable reputation or is highly priced, people tend to rate that wine as higher quality. But quality alone does not guarantee greatness. A compelling story can imbue a wine with the crucial components of memorability and uniqueness, giving it an advantage over others even before the first taste.”
The people’s wine (or beer)? Eric Asimov at the New York Times makes his low opinion of Fred Franzia and Two-Buck Chuck clear in this story. Asimov is a member of a “smaller group of wine lovers spend a considerable amount of time, energy and money on wine because they find it delicious, as well as rewarding intellectually and aesthetically.” Nonetheless, deep in the story is another instance where the word “wine” could be replaced with “beer” in two instances. “The wine industry itself is much to blame with its history of pretentiousness, and its absurd rituals and vocabulary that convey the message that one must be a connoisseur before one can enjoy wine.”
The chase continues. Bottle flippers, mules . . . you’ve read about them before. But, wait, this isn’t another beer story. In this one “the good stuff” is bourbon.
Headline Gussie Busch would not understand
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I was going to feel bad for criticizing Eric A. in your comments because I’ve done it here a few times before, but then realized it might have been more than ten years back! I gave up reading him years ago! So maybe he’s changed! But if his, um, appreciation of Fred Franzia is any indication, that’s not likely. I hope when he criticizes the “wine industry” as being to blame with pretentiousness, etc., he includes himself and many other wine writers as part of the industry he criticizes. He has always seemed willfully blind to the possibility that people who drink wines that don’t get taken seriously by critics may nonetheless find them delicious and rewarding aesthetically (dunno about intellectually). There are huge swaths of the country where the only wines available are “supermarket wine” ranging from Gallo/Paul Masson to maybe Rodney Strong, Hess Select/Fetzer, with maybe some foreign brands like Santa Marguerita or the wider bottlings of Penfold’s. People drinking them just might love them! His claim that the $15-20 realm offers a big jump in quality is fine if the wine hits, but if it misses, the pocketbook hit might be too much for folks, so taking the chances on these bottles is a true gamble. He’ll praise what are in effect “table wines” from other countries, but doesn’t recognize that what is available in the supermarket are in effect the U.S.’s table wines, and the ones he praises don’t have wide distribution here, so there’s artificial rarity and his praise for them still comes across as snobbery. I guess all this would be fine if he was just writing for rich folks in the NY/NJ/CT area, but the NYTimes is a national paper now, right?
Yes, it’s obvious Franzia was a huckster on one level, but he also knew wine could be enjoyable, and at least he brought folks to the world of wine, and those folks tended to make wine a part of their day. Asimov’s protestations aside, his writings smack less of thinking wine is delicious and engaging intellectually and aesthetically, and more of status and cliqueness. He has to do more than simply champion wines that aren’t super-pricey — bringing attention to wines that aren’t Romanee-Conti or Screaming Eagle while continually dismissing what people actually drink isn’t really championing wine.
I’m sure there are lessons for/parallels to the beer world, but good Lord, none of the beer folks have a decades-long column in the New York Times, fercryingoutloud.
It seems to me that by saying beer is engaging intellectually and aesthetically there is a danger of implying “I am smart enough to understand this and you are not” — which is the opposite of being inclusive. I will like beer drinkers and brewers to steer away from that.