- My New Favorite Beer Fib, Lie Or Utter Falsehood
This is one of the funnier quotes I have read from someone whose livelihood involves getting people to buy more good beer:
The beer belly myth is also something McClelland would like to help dispel. "A lot of Canadians perceive that beer is high in calories, or fattening," he said. "That's one of the reasons many females shy away from beer." But beer is actually low in calories, McClelland said. "It's probably just somewhere above water and tea."
Tea? TEA??? I am sure Guy McClelland, president of Ontario's McClelland Premium Imports, is a real nice guy but that is just about the stunnedest idea I have ever heard. As we have known for some time, beer packs a pretty decent caloric punch. Adding a six pack of something as light as Blue Moon to your diet adds about enough calories to add 1/3 of a pound to your bulk if you don't do something about it. Move up to the high alcohol bombers with double digit strength and you might as well be sucking back cake icing. People with interests in beer sales don't like mentioning this but no one without that interest really denies it. While recent study of Canadians indicate that the overall numbers of the most serious implications are actually lower than I would have thought, the ratio of beer benefits to beer detriments is established at a very sobering 1:10. No one really doubted that, right?
Lesson: make sure that when you are getting health advice about beer or otherwise that you are listening to someone whose specialty is medicine and not brew consulting or wholesale beer sales.
- Can I Run A Beer Tasting Session Without Tasting?
Here's the thing. I don't like to drink all that much on Sunday and really like to avoid drinking on Monday. It's not that I plan when I do but have always liked clear days. And, for other reasons, I have to stay clear anyway. But I was asked to present some IPAs to some good beery people tonight and, well, that's usually too interesting to pass up. So, I am going to get thinking about the stink of beer. I was over in northern NY Friday, bought a bunch of strong if not stenchily aromatic IPAs and plan to do a few experiments in smell-o-logy. I hope to finally prove the speed of smell. I am planning to see if anyone shouts out the word "parsley!!!" without prompting. And I also plan to see if we can find out how long beer people can go without actually sipping.
Should be fun. More later when the results start coming in. Any other experiments you suggest I impose upon the lab rats?
Update: A fairly focused range of beers can still illustrate a wide range of concepts about beer. I brought Oskar Blues Dales Pale Ale, Sixpoint Bengali Tiger, Stone Arrogant Bastard, Firestone Walker Double Jack, Anderson Valley Imperial IPA and Stoudt Double IPA. Beau's poured its Beaver River I.P.Eh. So here is some of what we thought about:
♦ Brand theme. Stone was compared to Sixpoint. Both have very iconic imagery but Stone conveys all that gargoyle content while Sixpoint is much more subtle... not hard while you think of it. Both identify but only one irritates. But does it matter as long as it identifies? Anderson Valley looked like a 70s album cover but we were unclear on Zep or Yes.
♦ Price point. The Sixpoint was the cheapest beer (at $5.00 per litre) but stood out with the Firestone Walker (at $12 per litre) as the more tasty two of the set. This got is us into a conversation about who is the market for beer that go from $12 to $20 per litre and beyond.
♦ Regionalist tastes. Stoudt at 10% had a butter note that got us into diacetyl while the Anderson Valley gave us hard water. I suggested this might be an east coast v. west coast phenomenon. We talked about some of the earthy notes in Quebec beers that you don't see elsewhere, too.
♦ Speed of smell. I clocked it at about 4 inches a second.
♦ Memory and taste. I wondered how much of taste and memory is the mind triggering taste associations as much as tastes and smell takes us back to a former place. I thought we unpack the mix of flavours in a given beer - and one that is very similar to the last and next beers - and our brain seeks to differentiate through distinguishing associations.Finally, what I really learned is that you can lead a tasting without tasting. You get to ask questions and listen. I find that usually much more interesting than hearing what I think.
- Session 60: The 64 Ounce Jug Is Considered
The 64 ounce beer jug - or growler - is sufficiently interesting to the guys as Washington Beer Blog that they made it the topic of this month's edition of The Session:These days people take growlers for granted. In my neck of the woods, growlers are a relatively new phenomenon. I don?t recall exactly when they appeared on the local beer scene but it could not have been more than eight or ten years ago. Maybe they existed in obscurity before. My memory fails me. Today growlers are everywhere. I think. Growlers are very common around the Pacific Northwest, anyway. I cannot speak to their popularity elsewhere. I?d love to know.
Unfortunately, by "everywhere" they mean large parts of the US. Growlers are only available at some breweries in my part of Canada. I have to drive an hour and a quarter to find the nearest growler fill. In Quebec, they are actually found pre-filled on the shelf in some retail shops, too. I have seen similar things, rarely, in the odd NY beer store instead of the normal tap fill but more and more they are showing up in grocery stores and even gas stations over there. It is a prudent sustainably green way to buy good beer you may want to have in a few days or so at a decent price. Once upon a time, they were galvanized steel pails served out a side window. But people can recycle them on you.
I actually discussed the growler as the fourth unacknowledged serving unit for beer back in Session 48. I was a year ahead of time. I like them a lot. Just wish I have access to them that is provided in a free society.
- Are There Different Schools Of Beer Thought?
Stan asked me to elaborate on something:Could you elaborate on what you mean by 'beer thinking'?
Hmm... I think there is beer thinking. If there is anything, there is a lot of under-thinking about beer thinking. If I were honest with you, there is a lot of under-thinking about over-thinking, too. Not sure if there is over-thinking about under-thinking but that could be, too. And if there is beer thinking there must be schools of thought. Can we describe them?
♦ The School of Aesthetics: As a pleasure trade, beer is concerned with sensory experience and - as with any ideas of beauty, art and enjoyment - the sensory-emotional values of the individual. In a way, all efforts to elaborate the subjective experience of the aesthetic undermine its purity. Boak and Bailey observed in a tweet this morning: "we're going to run out of language for talking about beer soon..." But as we know, by any other name, a beer is a beer is a beer. The aesthete knows that there is no higher thought than moving into a less conscious experience... maybe I could put that in a better way... a less dictated experience with their perception of pleasure. Yet less of that can be more of something else - the drunk, the addled.
♦ The School of Empiricism: These place the emphasis on observational evidence. While still involved in what we may experience, objective is added to the mix. In this school we find the historians, the data miners, the mash bill reviewers, the home brewing replicators. Just as the aesthete is the neighbour of the short term drunk and the long term addled, the empiricist can lead us astray through the musty corridors of the library. They forget sometimes that the well stocked beer shelf in a store or a pub is the only library you really need. They also lead to judging. Where the aesthete might describe, empiricists judge. The county fair jam and jelly contest is a very fine thing and a blue ribbon a treat - but remember: judge not lest ye be judged.
♦ The School of Ancient Wisdom: These accept received wisdom or, in another way, believers that others - their betters - were and are wiser. When you read enough beer books about the same few notions, it does become pretty evident that not thinking can in fact occur. I blame Jackson who did a very fine thing in layering classification upon us but then did not enforce enough that it was only one mode, one approach. As a result we are left with broadly practiced rote based lessons. They are related to conservative pessimistic approaches like skepticism as it presents a doubtful outlook, doubtful that there is anything new to be said. It also gives rise to experts to tell you, for a fee, that you do not know what is right. They even tell you that something is off when it's simply not to their taste. Never mind that. You simply need to be told.Ultimately, while each may have a place, each school distracts us from the good, that simple state of the moderate engagement with meaningful pleasure. When combined, they are disaster. Imagine a library where the best books were removed after a few weeks and taken out of circulation. Aestheticism meets empiricism. That is what we face here in Ontario with the restricted and regulated government store that stocks it shelves with temporary listings of good beer, our better's ideas of what the experts tell us to enjoy when and where they determine. And imagine a store that sells paperbacks for fifty bucks because there are only a few copies printed. The wise meets the empirical. That's what is being foisted upon us by short run swanked up brews which seem to have as part of their experimental goals a study of the best way to get wallets opened wider. But surely we have to forgive them. They know not what they do. Maybe. It is always truly wise to recall the first lesson of Thales.
Are there more schools? Many more no doubt and likely splintering schismists amongst these schools above each trying to set in stone a better more complex rule to define what for most really does not need proscription. They do as much harm as good. Each aggrandizes an aspect what is essentially a simple thing - the enjoyment of a malt mildly intoxicating beverage that has been enjoyed for thousands of years quite nicely, thank you.
- The Oldest Beer Joke In History... But Wuzzit Mean?
So they finally got to the bottom of a box of Iraqi cuneiform tablets dug up in 1976 and found some written by some guy trying to be funny as reported in the New York Daily News:
This one could also benefit from cranking up the laugh track:
?In your mouth and your teeth, constantly stared at you, the measuring vessel of your lord. What is it?
Beer.?So there you have it: an ancient beer joke. (At least, a riddle referring to its taste, the authors say.) Perhaps something has been lost in the translation through all those many centuries. And since they were meant as riddles designed to communicate truths about life - "wisdom literature," as the authors call it -- perhaps gut-splitting hilarity was not the point.
Well, how many riddles today really bust a gut. Few. What I find more interesting are the underlying premises. The person has a lord. The person constantly sees beer. Perhaps he is saying that the measure of a lord's virtue is his generosity with the beer.
After clicking through various news articles of increasing seriousness, I actually arrived at the scholarly article upon which the story is based. Go to page 117. I don't know why the speculation is that this is the work of a student as there are two references to the impotency of a soldier as well as the ethical status of leaders - plus some sex and a bit of beer. Its a view from down there somewhere and it's a bit telling. Any other ideas? I know from the emails that you've been clamoring for a chance to play Mesopotamian cuneiform scholar so live it up.
