{"id":882,"date":"2009-02-02T06:41:36","date_gmt":"2009-02-02T13:41:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/?p=882"},"modified":"2009-02-02T06:44:28","modified_gmt":"2009-02-02T13:44:28","slug":"monday-musing-beer-as-an-object-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/monday-musing-beer-as-an-object-of-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday musing: Beer as an object of art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well I give up all my sculpturing
\n‘Cause my life had gone all sad
\nAn I went to work down at the factory
\nIt weren’t art … but it weren’t bad
\nSo
\nThey put me on the assembly line
\nPutting plastic leaves on the plastic palms
\nThen they shipped then off the Los Angeles
\nYeah it weren’t art … but it weren’t wrong
\nNow some say it’s pathetic
\nWhen you give up your aesthetic
\nFor a blue collar job in the factory
\nBut all that exhibiting
\nWas just too damn inhibiting
\nFor a beer drinking
\nRegular guy … like me<\/em><\/p>\n

                    – Terry Allen, Oui<\/b><\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

Does it seem like a stretch to call these art?<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

Is the art in what a brewer actually does in the process or end result, in neither, in both?<\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

 <\/code><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-ee","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":892,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions\/892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}