The Syncretism of Sam Adams

When Christian missionaries first arrived in Norse villages, they faced a pantheon of fierce pagan deities; a mythology so ingrained in ancient Scandinavian spirituality that questioning it might incur the wrath of Thor. But the missionaries would not be swayed from their righteous path, and they were smart and patient. They dissected what they could of the runish lore, and began to see similarities that they might exploit to sow the seeds of their (comparatively new) gospels.

“So your god, Baldr? The perfect son of your all-father god, who was betrayed and killed but will rise again at the end of days? He’s a lot like our Jesus. Funny coincidence, no? I can read this Bible to you if you want to know more.”

When Jim Koch first walked into the twinkling lights of the Boston bar scene in 1984, he faced a stubborn generation of beer drinkers; consumers so conditioned to drink American pale lager that few knew there were other options, and even fewer dared to try them. But Koch had a dream born of fermentation, and he was smart and patient. He saw in the yellow swirl of carbonated buzz the potential for more; gustatorily and economically.

“So this beer? Miller Lite? Crisp, refreshing, easy to drink, and not so hard on your wallet? It’s a lot like my beer. I’ll leave this bottle of Boston Lager here if you want to know more.”

There has been a lot of buzz about Jim Koch and his company, Boston Beer, over the past week. Lots of talk about his behavior in a certain bar, how “the industry” views Sam Adams as a whole, and what that means for the future (and history) of the subculture. Some beer enthusiasts rushed to defend the company who despite constantly outgrowing its clothes, somehow still gets brought back under the fold of “craft” by a very accomodating Brewer’s Association. Others turned on the proven veteran, claiming Koch was just suffering from an acute case of “get off my lawn syndrome” in the face of a rapidly expanding and youthwardly trending American beer landscape.

Those who wrote about him (regardless of how they felt about Koch himself [or his beer]) seemed to agree unanimously that whatever he says or does now doesn’t change the fact that without him, we wouldn’t be drowning in this dry-hopped utopia that is the “craft beer revolution.”

But what did Koch really do? Andy Crouch’s piece in Boston Magazine covers the specific details as they relate to the beer business very well, so I won’t rehash them here. But other brewing prophets like Maytag, Papazian, McAullife, and Grossman all recorded their malten glory onto the annals of beerish history around the same time, so why does Koch stand out? Is it the large-scale success of Boston Beer, the unquestionable ubiquity, the “you can make dreams happen” narrative that makes him into such a figure of beer legend?

Maybe.

But I don’t think that’s all of it. Koch wasn’t just lucky or a master of timing. He tapped into something older and deeper than practiced corporate marketing, something cultural influencers have used for centuries to deftly mold the streams of human history.

Koch saw a blip on the social radar, the potential to inject a new idea, a new movement, and using all his business savvy, capitalized. Sure, he was a brewer and enthusiast which helped him position the product, but he was also a Capitalistic opportunist with a keen eye for markets. He looked and saw a post-Vietnam realignment, the decadence of the party culture of the 80s, a noticeable paradigm shift in America’s attitude towards hedonism. In the changing behavior and economics, he saw the consumer’s desire for new options, but knew he’d have to take it smooth and slow.

As my friend Douglas pointed out, Vienna Lager isn’t exactly a cutting edge beer, and for at least 100 years before Koch concocted his fabled kitchen-batch, the Germans had been perfecting the style over in the Rhineland. But I think Koch knew that. He dare not introduce something so wild as a pale ale; it was much too bitter for the average American consumer and Sierra Nevada had already established roots in that market. He dare not try any reigning English styles, for the American presumption that all English beer was flat and warm still echoed across polished hardwood bars.

No, he needed a beer that was a Jesus to the Norse Baldr; similar enough that a drinker would understand it and associate positive things with it, but different enough to stand alone, and in some ways, be superior to the original. He needed a tool for conversion. Eventually, like a syncromesh between two whirring gears, he used Boston Beer to bridge the gap between macro and micro, one restaurant tapline at a time.

To me, that is what Jim Koch did. Reintroduced the truth of beer to the unenlightened; those poor souls who suffered in the pale-dark under a cruel regime of relatively choiceless banality. He showed them they had other choices, could believe in other things that were potentially more in line with their baser instincts. It has nothing to do with his beer now and everything to do with his beer then. It’s less about the quality of Sam Adams in comparison to the contemporary craft brewery, and more about the legacy of Boston Lager.

Everyone claiming his beers are “middle of the road” might consider that perhaps they’re middle of the road by design, to appeal to those drinkers who weren’t or aren’t ready to give up their religion of libation in favor of some modern cult of flavor. The Norse didn’t ever fully adopt Christianity, but they did eventually use parts of it; the parts they liked, that fit in with their world view, that made their daily lives a little easier. A BMC drinker who starts drinking Sam Adams is, I think all those in beer now will agree, a step in the right direction.

All other arguments of style and quality aside, why wouldn’t Koch be upset with the situation at Row 34? Imagine how the Pope might feel in an LDS church when someone begins to explain Joseph Smith’s discovery of the golden plates; to hear relative newcomers to your world announce in palpably arrogant tones that the way things have always been done, the way history recorded them and recognizes them, the way you’ve built your entire life, is wrong. Then imagine everyone in the room (a gaggle of folks who used to fully support you) agrees with the seeming blasphemy. It’s soul-shattering stuff to have your beliefs publicly questioned, and I’m sure Koch felt more hurt than angry, more confused than cantankerous.

However you feel about Boston Beer (full disclaimer: I quite enjoy Noble Pils but don’t drink much other Sam Adams) or Koch himself, you have to respect that without him, the palate of the average drinker would not have (so quickly) turned down the road we’re all now hurtling down with reckless abandon. Boston Lager ended up in every Applebee’s in the continental because Koch is a shrewd business man, but also because a whole metric-crap ton of American beer drinkers bought (and continue to buy) the stuff. The proof is in the growth and sales, whether your personal tastes lie on the positive or negative side of the beers coming out of Jamaica Plain.

Boston Beer’s stylistically timid foray in the trendy IPA market (and I mean “timid” in a hop profile sense not an economic one, given that Rebel is selling like hot cakes on a cold day) echoes the syncretistic philosophy that made him a billionaire: you win-over Bud Light drinkers with something similar to Bud Light, not a stinging hopstorm slinging double digit ABV. Koch isn’t trying to blow the collective minds of established beer enthusiasts (which seems to be the modern trend), he’s trying to bring something wonderful to the ones who haven’t yet seen the light, raise the average quality of beer in the entire country.

But just because he’s not directly vying for your dollar, doesn’t mean he’s not entitled to your respect.

Would someone else have come along eventually and done the same thing? Maybe. Probably. Definitely. But who cares about that now? Our history says Koch was integral in bringing better beer to the masses. That alone is worth a raise of the glass, a nod of the head, and a sincere salute to the legacy of Sam Adams.

(Note: I realize comparing Koch to the Pope is outlandish and possibly offensive. I just liked the analogy and ran with it. Please don’t take it too seriously.)

The Session #95: Beer Books? Beer Books.

I have a book idea. An idea that, quite unincredulously, is for a book that is about beer.

In fact, I have much more than an idea: a full proposal, a complete outline, several (somewhat) fleshed-out sample chapters, pages upon pages of notes and research and scenes.

I have a proto-beer book. All the elements of primordial literary soup that just need a bolt of publishing lightning to create new bookish life.

Unfortunately, I am not going to talk about that particular idea (but if you are an agent or publisher type who would like to know more, I am always available here). While I realize it’s very difficult for someone to steal and then properly execute a complicated project, I also think it’s intellectual folly to tell too many people about something that is not yet, and a waste of creative energy to let the buzzing singularity of the idea dissipate across the infinite reaches of the internet.

So no, I won’t be talking about my book idea. But that doesn’t stop me from talking about other book ideas, and trends I’d like to see emerge on the more formal side of beer writing.

Of all the books I read in 2014, only six of them were specifically about beer: Capital Beer (Greg Kitsock), Maine Beer (Josh Christie), Baltimore Beer (Rob Kasper), Yeast (Chris White with Jamil Zainasheff), Malt (John Mallet), and The Craft Beer Revolution (Steve Hindy). I know some other, fantastic beer books came out this year (I still haven’t read Boak and Bailey’s Brew Britannia yet, and feel great shame), but many haven’t made it into bed-time reading rotation yet due to me only having two eyeballs and a finite number of conscious hours.

Two technical books and four history books. I enjoyed them all, if I’m being honest. But mainly because each one taught me a lot, not necessarily because they were fun to read. We seem to be in the middle of a trend about trying to teach everyone about beer: guide the rookie through styles and brewing techniques; introduce the journeyman to newer, more complicated topics; inundate the veteran with rehashings of not-so-long-lost histories. It’s a trend I applaud, given that the understanding of beer – even among some of those who calls themselves “beer people” – is still generally poor. If contemporary beer books finally break that guy of claiming he hates hops while he exclusively drinks IPAs, or make a new drinker feel more confident in ordering a beer she knows she’ll like, I’d call that a victory.

The peddling of beerish lore to the receptive student will always be a great thing for the industry, and I’m clearly guilty of trying to spread lupulin-laced education. But writing (blogs and magazines and books), need not always be lectures given by the learned to the not about fundamental facts, doesn’t always have to be grounded in the dry and practical, and most certainly doesn’t always have to be so tangibly tethered to the drink itself.

So, in 2015, I’d like to see some books that are about beer, but also distance themselves from the particulars of beer at the same time:

• Beer and Psychology: While the psychology of alcohol dependence seems obvious, I’m especially curious about the psychology of taste: how does the psychology of our processing of flavor support the trends toward more complex and bigger beers? Is there any connection between economically depressed Americans being disillusioned with the world and the trends to seek out the biggest, boldest flavors they can find? Is there an inverse relationship with this connection and the decline of subtle lagers? Is an evolving palate a psychological phenomenon or a physical one (or both)?
• Medicine and Beer: A spin off of the first idea, but with a focus on the positive and negative aspects of beer consumption. Are we doing to see more illnesses from a generation who drinks more and more? How are high calorie, high ABV beers contributing to America’s struggle with obesity? Will we ever consider beer a “whole food” and find some health benefits in moderate consumption, ala red wine?
• Green Brewing: Are our barley and hop farming processes sustainable? Is brewing helping or harming the planet, as it stands? There is no GMO barley now, but as demand grows, might that change? What does the future agricultural landscape of brewing look like? Are modern breweries concerned about (and making plans to address) waste water and spent grain practices and other sustainability related issues?
• Homebrewing Revival:  Has the surge in beer’s popularity given homebrew shops a new lease on life? What about the National Homebrewer’s Association and its sundry branches? There have to be some stories behind how those groups benefited from the economic boom of beer, most of which are untold at this point, I think. Will the increase in homebrewing ever compete with or put a dent in the economics of beer? Has homebrewing created a group of consumers who know more about the nuances of a product than ever before?
• Big Beer Fear: This may be difficult to pull off, but I’d love a probing look into Big Beer in 2015, potentially a real look into what they think about “craft” and how they plan to react. I think the time for casually dismissing smaller, local breweries is over, and there’s probably some fascinating corporate group-think going on in boardrooms that would potentially make for an excellent book.
• Beer Fiction: I know I may be in the minority of wanting this, but I get giddy every time I see a fictional character drinking beer, like Switters from Tom Robbin’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. I think there is a lot of room for fiction grounded in beer, or for protagonists who happen to adopt the modern beer drinker’s attitudes and behaviors (for better or worst). Or even a historical novel about brewing during colonialism, or during pre-industrialization, or hell something wacky, like during the black plague.

In 2015, I would not like to see:

• Any new “guides to beer” that don’t add anything to the already massive pile of beer information available, well, pretty much everywhere.

The Session #94: The Way I Role

(DING is back as our host for The Session #94, this time asking us to consider our individual roles in the beer community/industry)

As I downloaded the pictures we’d taken in Gettysburg after my wife’s birthday-turned-photoshoot, I had to briefly pass through hundreds of shots of bottles and cans of beer in front of our guests. I’d hooked my laptop up to the TV, and my previously imported beertography spilled out all over Lightroom, too fluid and legion to clean up or hide quickly. My wife’s friend noticed, and laughed. “Did you really need to take so many pictures of beer?” The rest of the room laughed with her.

I felt a flush of embarrassment. There are a lot of photos of beer on my computer. Nearly 200 GB, if I’m being honest. Lots and lots of photos that are nearly identical, short of a slight change in depth of field, or a minor adjustment in framing. The nested folders of images translate to many hours behind the viewfinder, and exist as proof of my obsession that few people ever see.

Did I really need to take so many pictures of beer? Yes, I did.

To me, every photo contains a story, or at least the potential for one. The old adage parrots “a thousand words” but to me there’s more than just the details in the arrangement of the pixels. I spend so much time and take so many pictures trying to capture that one fleeting second, the one perfect microcosm of me, in our culture, at that exact moment, all so I can tell a story.

Not so I can promote a brewery. Not so I can earn money. Not so I can show off.

Only to tell a story.

It’s the same reason my mind builds narratives when I’m scanning beer labels, or wandering around a brewhouse, or ordering another round for friends. Beside all those proto-photos rest skeletons of stories, bones and structure with no meat, frameworks waiting for an infusion of reality to reanimate them.

I’m a writer who lives in a beerish world, and as a result, I’m always trying to mine the veins of our culture for some literary truth. I feel obligated to tell the stories that make up my world, that make up our world, so writing about beer becomes a literal manifestation of “writing what I know.”

Contemporary beer writing has been plagued by a decided lack of storytelling. It’s not completely systemic, but I do see a lot of writing that, while functionally fine, reads like technical documentation or corporate copy. The latent sex-appeal of beer has been supplanted by a strange utilitarian slant, where brewing details, tasting notes, and arguments over semantics have wrestled importance away from engaging a reader and potentially teaching them something.

We’ve gone full-throttle on the science and the details, but forgotten that industry need not be mechanical and cold, and that a lot people have difficulty connecting with data and flat exposition. We’ve forgotten that humans are hardwired to follow narratives, connect to characters, to start at the beginning and stop at the end.

In short: we’ve built the rituals and canon of beer without developing any of the mythology. Joseph Campbell would be pissed.

I try to populate the empty pantheon. I try to weave all the loose threads into cohesive forms, move past the liquid in the glass to stories that people want to read. I’m not always successful, I know, but that’s my “role” if I had to pick one.

Writers have more competition for attention than ever in the history of writing, so I feel it important, if not downright necessary, to write something that’s free from errors, creatively composed, fundamentally worth reading. Either because it has a point that makes one challenge presupposition, or because it’s legitimately fun to read or intrinsically beautiful.

That’s it. No other secret plans or ulterior motives or special considerations. I’ve always enjoyed reading stories (I might even argue that I participate in them), so it only makes sense that I’d enjoy writing them, too. To me, human history is one big book, and American beer is a chapter that’s still being written. Let’s make sure it’s a good chapter, a chapter worthy of all this cultural passion, one story at a time.

Birthday-turned-photoshoot results. Worth way more than a 1000 words, I think.

Introducing Pintiptor™ – A Treatment for your Moderate to Severe Hopothermia

::Fade in to man washing dishes in a brightly lit, country-style kitchen::

“I’m not just a beer drinker; I’m a beer enthusiast. But when I noticed that my every conversation inevitably turned to beer, and saw all my friends roll their eyes and make excuses to get away from me at parties, I decided it was time to go see my doctor.”

::Cut to scene of man rubbing his throat and wincing, trying to talk to his doctor::

“My doctor told me I was suffering from Hopothermia, a relatively common condition that affects 40-50 percent of all craft beer drinkers between the ages of 21 and 85. Hopothermia numbs the lining of your tongue and brain, causing taste bud amnesia and temporary insanity. When I began to tell my doctor my feelings about AB-InBev’s purchase of 10 Barrel Brewing, he prescribed Pintiptor™ (Imbibvimutinal).”

::Cut to scene of smiling man lifting five-gallon carboys of golden-colored liquids::

Soothing Voiceover: When rambling on Facebook and Twitter aren’t enough, adding Pintiptor™ can help reduce the chances of boring everyone around you. Pintiptor™ helps to assuage your need to scrutinize every business decision in the brewing industry by pinpointing the receptors in your brain that help you remember that you started drinking beer because it tastes good. In clinical trials, patients saw a 100 percent increase in drinking beer without overthinking it. Beer drinking adults reported a 50 percent reduction in having opinions about Stone Brewing in as little as four months when taking Pintiptor™.

::Cut to scene of man smiling with his wife, sharing a bomber of local beer::

Soothing Voiceover: Pintiptor™ is not for everyone; including people with liver problems and women who are nursing, pregnant, or may become pregnant. Tell your doctor if you are on any other medications, or experience any strong opinions about wine or scotch, as this may be the sign of seriously annoying side effect. 

Pintiptor™ can lower your ability to fight internet trolls, including beer snobs. Serious and sometimes embarrassing side effects like vomiting in public, sleeping past noon on a Saturday, and having to admit you don’t know when the latest hyped seasonal will be released can occur. Before starting Pintiptor™, ask your doctor to test you for pretentiousness. Ask your doctor if you live in or have been to a region where certain yeast infections are common. High blood sugar and original gravity has been reported in patients who take Pintiptor™. Other risks include increased drymouth, lack of ability to make small talk in taprooms, flavor overload, people thinking you’re a cool person, forgetting how to use Twitter, and simple beer appreciation, which may become permanent. Call your doctor if you experience worsening symptoms, or suddenly develop an interest in the grooming habits of Greg Koch or Garrett Oliver. 

::Cut to scene of man sitting at table in restaurant with friends, laughing and drinking a plain old amber ale::

“It feels great to drink beer just to enjoy it again.”

Soothing Voiceover: Tell your doctor if you’ve ever had beard envy, malt mania, or brewer’s elbow, or are prone to hypochondria. You should not start Pintiptor™ if you have any kind of real, financial stake in the brewing industry.

If you can’t afford your medication, AstraZeneca and MillerCoors may be able to help.

::Show Pintiptor™ Logo::

Enjoy beer again. Ask your doctor about Pintiptor™ today.

::Fade out::

You don’t have to live with Hopothermia. But it wouldn’t be so bad. This is a great beer.

The Session #93: Mendenhall

(This month’s session comes to us from Brian, Maria, and their RV, Stanley, over at The Roaming Pint. The topic asks us to walk a slightly different path than normal and not talk about “what” beery places we’ve visited, but “why” visiting them is important.)

Enough salmon crowd themselves into the creek that you think you might be able to walk across their silvery backs to the other side. The sockeye slide and bump in an teeming mass of scales, wriggling onward in nonstop reproductive pilgrimage even when the water doesn’t look wide enough for ten of them, never mind a hundred. Tenacious to a fault, those fish.

A short bus ride and a brief hike past black bear warnings deposits you in front of an alien wall of ice; eerie blue glow and otherworldly jagged geometry like features from a Lovecraft fiction. A glacier cuts slow through nature like a cold, sharp blade, sparing no rock or tree, staring out onto the world in unstoppable defiance. Even when a chunk of ice the size of a monster truck cracks and falls from its face, Mendenhall does not flinch.

The air doesn’t like tourists. It whips and hisses, stinging eyes and ears and anything exposed. The gentle waterfall in Mendenhall’s left hand throws icy mists at anyone foolish enough to get close. Groups of tourists talk about bears and wolves, and best practices to avoid being mauled. If not for the awe of it all, being a spec and blip in front of a force of nature that defies geology physically and temporally, this lake would be a terrible place to visit.

Your throat hurts. You’re pretty sure you picked something up from that guy who was coughing in the buffet line on the ship. The constant blustering keeps you alert, but you want nothing more than to curl back up in your cabin, let the lapping of waves against the hull be your Alaskan lullaby. But you’ve only got one day in Juneau. More like eight hours. Four hundred and eighty minutes to take in the entire spirit of a town, a state, a wilderness; a place you may not see again for a long time, if ever.

So what can you do? Tired and sick but racked by the guilt of potentially missing a once-in-a-lifetime adventure?

Go have a beer.

Your cab driver didn’t know there was a brewery in Juneau. You show him the star surrounding the “Alaskan Brewing Company” logo on the poorly detailed cruise ship map, and he chuckles playfully; an audible admission that he probably should have known it was there. The yellow Ford bobs down Glacier highway, ending between two evergreen-decked hills bigger than most of the mountains of Maryland. The building is quiet; no one moves barrels outside, no steam betrays a boil at roil, even the sky darkens from coming storm. You think for a moment that you misread the hours, that in the fog of fever you’d forgotten what day it was.

But the lights are on, and you seem movement on the bottling line. The door to taproom swings open, and you’re greeted by three employees but no one else. In that moment, you have the brewery, basically, all to yourself. You admittedly don’t know all that much about beer. You just started reading about it, buying, trying different beers, so you feel like sort of an impostor smiling for a picture between two towers of stainless. But it’s all Willy Wonka to you. The lovely barkeep lets you sample everything; the ham and bacon of the smoked porter, the overwhelming hop of the IPA, the crisp just-to-your-taste finish of the iconic Alaskan Amber. For a moment, in the cozy wood-lined room, surrounded by the welcoming warmth of the familiar in a faraway land, your sore throat goes away, you relax, and you feel like you understand a tiny bit more about a place you’d always regarded as rugged and remote.

Why do we visit the places our beer is made? To meet the people who make it. The people who have, by luck or by default, made their living brewing and peddling beer. The people at the brewery are a cross-section of the culture; locals, families, pieces of the town arranged together and presented in a mosaic liquid that’s representative of what it means to live there, now. Sure, you get to wash new tastes across your tongue and see marvels of engineering, but a visit to a brewery isn’t rooted tangible takeaways. The tree’s roots run deeper.

We visit these places to get to know them outside of our preconceived notions. Outside of how they’re represented on TV or the internet. Outside of the polished veneer of marketing and social media posturing. A taproom is real; filled with the actual people behind the beer that brought you there, not field representatives or only tangentially related distributors. To travel for beer is to forge a connection that’s deeper than lips and pint glasses, to learn more about the kinds of people and places that value their product, their business, and making people happy.

It’s fun, yes, to say “I’ve been there” or “I’ve seen that,” but the real reason for our own salmon-like pilgrimage to breweries far and wide is to be able to say, “I met them” and “I get them.”

 

The New Yorker “Beer” Cover – What We’re Missing in de Seve’s Message

This graphic bounced its way around Twitter like a drunken hummingbird yesterday, dragging behind it a whole cacophony of commentary about what the illustration implied about beer culture. Admittedly, my first reaction fell in the blast-zone of “defensive indignation” as I viewed the cover as a slight to anyone who had migrated from domestic macro to domestic craft, a bit of high brow mockery that screamed “unfair.” I ran around perpetuating that idea all day, hoping with an odd, maternal instinct, to protect the industry and people I’d grown to love from potential harm.

It took Matt LaFleur (the artist who designed and drew my blog logo) to point out that this illustration was the work of Peter de Sève, a long time cover-artist for the New Yorker. In my ignorance of all things good, I’d never heard of him until yesterday. I had no idea that this satirical, hyberbolized style was a defining element of his work, and that this cover is part of a bigger trend he has for creating butting narratives and social commentary about New York City in a single drawing. The problem here was not with the art itself, or de Sève’s intentions, but in my woefully inaccurate interpretation of his intentions.

There seemed to be just as many pro-fermentation people who considered this a positive cover; that if a publication as prestigious and established as the New Yorker would feature beer on its cover, it officially meant that craft beer had “made it.” I think you don’t need to look very far past the economic outlook of beer to see “made it” painted in rising black lines on sheets of green, but I get where they’re coming from.

My concern is that both gut reactions seem to miss the bigger point. I deeply respect illustrators partly because I don’t have a single atom of illustrative talent in my body, partly because of their ability to weave a complex narrative into their lines and colors, all within the confines of eight and a half by eleven. Peter de Sève isn’t just an artist who draws for the New Yorker who wanted to do a “beer cover” because it was trendy. He’s a storyteller, touching on how beer is evolving in his city, and in turn, the country.

It’s a tad incongruent that the story of rising appreciation for beer (and with it rising snobbery about beer) was sort of lost in the tribal division of whether it was “good” or “bad” as a message about the subculture, because said subculture is always clamoring for more stories that dig deeper, tell more, expose some truth. Well here is it! Right there on the cover of the New Yorker. A complete story about where craft beer stands today, in all its dual and polarizing glory. De Sève has managed to both give beer a boost up onto the saddle with wine by direct comparison of behavior, and give it a somewhat deserving sucker punch in its bearded, snobby jaw. It’s as well done a story about beer as I’ve read (or seen) in a long time, and I think that’s what we need to take away from this cover, not some selfish stance on what it means for beer people or the community.

The reality is that many outside the scene do see craft beer people as snobs; at best dismissive and close-minded about anything beyond their preference, at worst pedantic assholes who make sweeping judgments about whole groups of people based on something as metaphysically hollow as beer. I know, I know. It’s not all of us. It might not even be many of us. But it’s some of us, enough of us to have a “Tea Partiers on the Republicans” style effect of painting the whole group with one big, broad brush stroke of unfair social placement. And I’m here to remind everyone that there’s next to nothing any of us can do about it, other than not be snobs and scenesters ourselves in hopes that over time, public opinion will swing back to something more acceptingly benign.

If you dig into de Sève’s other works, you’ll find that he’s a master of the social joke, at poking fun while also forcing some serious questions to the surface of the narrative. The health consciousness of this lion could be a jab at trendy vegan/vegetarianism, or a subtle nod that maybe all of us, even the career carnivores, should probably eat a little better. The beer cover does the same. Our foreground character is a black woman, subtly touching on both the lack of gender and racial diversity in beer. The server is a stereotype, but an apt one, one we all know very well from our local taproom on a Friday night. The drinker himself may be a microcosm of what the “beer guy” looks like from the outside of the beer world, a snapshot looking in, that we should all sort of look at and say, “huh, yea, maybe.”

So appreciate that de Sève has taken such an interest, and given us all this reflective opportunity. The accompanying story to this cover closes with, “It’s an unprecedentedly excellent time to drink beer in Brooklyn, as the cover suggests.” I don’t think the cover suggests that. I think it suggests a whole lot more.

For anyone interested, here’s some more of de Sève’s New Yorker covers (for storytelling reference): 

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Five Years, Five Beers

Today, in all its falling leafy glory, marks the fifth anniversary of this blog. It’s hard to believe that 1825 days have waxed and waned since I first plugged “Literature and Libation” into WordPress, thinking I was very clever for such thematically appropriate alliteration.

Nostalgia is equal parts funny and sad. I remember my first stabs at beer writing; terrible reviews of Bud Light Platinum and Newcastle Founders Ale written mainly at the urging of my sister. I’m not sure if she actually believed in my ability or just wanted something to break the boredom of her workday, but I have to indirectly thank her for setting me down this wet and wild hopped road.

My timing in starting the blog coincided (perhaps serendipitously) with a change in my life, a time when I started to realize I was no longer that “college kid,” that my view and opinions were changing, moving, realigning with my more adult understanding of the world. It also just so happened to line up – like the planets slipping silently into perfect linear arrangement – with the period I started drinking better beer.

I’ve tried many, many beers in these five years; probably more than I had in the five previous to these, combined. At the behest of my friendly neighborhood brewing wizards this blog forced me out of the quiet simplicity of my Shire, taking me on adventures I’d never expected, showing me a world full of hoppy wonder and malty marvel. But in all those beers I sampled and sipped, I always returned to a some staples, stalwarts, those faithful, consistent few. These beers are more than my comfort falls backs, more than the fermented pajamas I slip into after a long and arduous day, they were my training wheels, my guides, my glass-clad sherpas up the mountains of good beer.

So on this anniversary, I salute them. And their brewers. And all the staff that helped bring them to me, and me to this world I love so much.

1. Dogfish Head 60 Minutes IPA

First came Sam’s flagship, the first “craft” beer I can remember my parents ever having in stock. My first reactions to IPA flirted dangerously close to “bitter beer face” but as my taste buds shed their nascent skin, I grew to appreciate how much was going on in a bottle of 60, and how easily accessible (if a tad pricey) such a different beer had become. I always come back to 60 minute as a reference point, some grounding, a reminder of where my taste for hops came form, and where beer was five, six, or seven years ago. When I first started this blog, I had no idea why it was even called 60 minute, assuming it was named such because it would take someone an hour just to finish one bottle.

2. Flying Dog Doggie Style (now Pale Ale)

A part of my beer-drinking self always latched itself to no-frills pale ales, either out of irrational loyalty to what my father taught me to love, or out of safety, comfort, the beauty of repeatable simplicity. Whatever fueled it, it manifested in Flying Dogs award winning pale; there’s nothing particularly wild about it, but there it is, balanced, refreshing, happy to be the middle child between weird exotic yeasts and tired pale lagers. From this safe base of pale malt I felt confident to branch out into pretty much any style: I always had a big soft pint of pale to fall back into if things got a little too freaky and yeasty.

3. Heavy Seas Loose Cannon

The pirate in me gives me orders, his drunken swaggering the impetus for a lot of my rambling of the same. It’s no surprise I took to Heavy Seas; they’re local, they’re good, they’re unabashedly pirate themed. While I enjoy quite a few of their beers, Loose Cannon sidled up to me early, mug of grog in hand, sly whispers of, “you like 60 minute? Well you’ll love me.”

And I did. And do. And probably always will. It’s my quintessential Maryland beer, and that’s saying a lot (sorry Natty Boh).

4. Sam Adams Boston Lager

A cliche? Perhaps. A mistake? Never. All recent commercials aside, Sam Adams Boston Lager is a pretty fantastic gateway beer. It has everything you could want without being offensive about it. There’s also something to respect about the market positioning Sam Adams set the rest of the industry up for, and sometimes I buy their beer simply out of beer guy respect. Are there better options? Sometimes. But you’ll almost never have a friend turn down a Boston Lager, even if their normal drinking typically falls much much further in BMC territory.

5. Yuengling Lager

I just can’t quit the old girl from Pottsville. I’ve tried. Oh, how I’ve tried. In my early years of being a mindless craft crusaders, I swore off “junk” beer like Yuengling, feigning some kind of pretentious elitism that somehow, despite everything Yuengling had done for me, made me better than the beer. Well I’m not. I’m not better than any beer. The pedigree behind even the lowest rated and much maligned beers still outweighs mine a thousand fold. I’m especially not better than the good ole girl from Pottsville.

So to celebrate my perfuntory triumph of managing not to burn out too badly or quit in a huff of public, Twitter glory, I’m not going to reach into the back of the fridge for some rare beer. I’m not going to chuck harpoons looking for whales. I’m definitely not going to forget where I came from, how I got here, and which beers were integral to keeping me on track.

Here’s to the standbys, the go-tos, to old friends. But more importantly, here’s to all you readers and all your support. If I had the time and money to buy you all a beer, I most certainly would.

Here’s to beer. Here’s to writing. Here’s to five more years.

Mashing in Masham (A Tour of Theakston Brewery)

Against a backdrop of rows of ivy-covered cottages, tiny winding Yorkshire roads lined by impossibly close hedges, and the idyllic contrast of bleach white cricket uniforms on verdant green, that unmistakable pungent waft of yeast lets you know there’s a brewery nearby. You can see it from the road, but unmarked and austere it looks like any old industrial remnant in a small English town; one square, stone smokestack rising up like a Gulliver among Lilliputians.

You have to search a bit. First for a place to park in the crowded but lively square of Masham town, second for a sign that actually points you in the direction of the brewery. Down a side road, past some private residences. Through a stone alley with a slowly rusting black iron gate. Under a long pergola shaded in fragrance by thousands of budding, nascent hops. Finally to a little patio that welcomes you, cheerfully, to the “Black Bull in Paradise.”

Tucked back in a cozy alcove of the town like a beery nest for migratory drinkers, there’s an old cooper’s house grinning the same stone and wood smile (plus some minor dental work) it has had on its face since 1827. To the right, a darkened doorway leads into a room with a low ceiling, exposed beams, and a rough stone floor. To the left there’s an impromptu beer garden, framed neatly by a rainbow menagerie of empty casks (not kegs!), all awaiting their filled fate.

A brief stroll through a surprisingly stocked gift shop and past two green-clad employees, will drop you into the quaintest of pubs, half ripped from a Tolkien novel, half planted firmly in reality, all the English whimsy a beer-minded American could dream of. This is no modern, urban American tap house; only 6 pulls line the bar with perfect parallel panache, each connected to a classic beer engine, with nary of molecule of carbon dioxide to be found in the entire building. You overhear a patron mention malt between sips of his Black Bull Bitter; a cheery woman at the end of the bar waxes brewlific about the
protein of two-row barley, and how to combat inevitable haze. Her vocabulary has all the hallmarks of a brewer, so you gently inject yourself into the conversation. Lynne. She’s not a brewer, but your tour guide.

Lynne leads the small group, six plus your party of five, back under the hoppy pergola, down a different side alley, past freshly painted red windows and doors. As she walks she talks, giving a brief history of the nearly two hundred year old brewery, describing the founding, sale, merger, and eventually reacquisition of the facilities to bring it back “under old management” in 2003. It’s impossible to ignore the stark difference of the building – and its history – when compared to the contemporary breweries you’re used to, State-side.

Her green shirt like a green light to explore the premises, Lynne leads you up some worn stairs to a room piled high and wide with bags of Simpsons Malt. A large pulley-powered conveyor lifts the fifty pound sacks to the top floor of the building; the first in many steps to use gravity (not pneumatics) to move and brew beer in the classic tower-style brewery. Several winding red staircases later and you’re at the very top, in a room that smells like Sunday morning; toasted bread and sweet cereal. The mill cracks the grain at the apex so that it can be easily passed into the lauter tun, one room away and about 5 feet down. Before leaving, Lynne describes all the ingredients – from the pale and crystal to the Bramling Cross plugs. Each in the group takes turn cracking the malt between their teeth. Some smile at the surprise sweetness, others cringe after crunching too hard on some astringent roasted barley.

You stop at the sadly empty lauteur tun. It’s a behemoth, ringed by cast iron, topped with a braced and riveted wooden lid. Lynne explains that it’s almost original, and the cast iron bowl only had to be replaced once in 187 years of brewing. The wooden top, subject to hours and days and years of hot mashing, hasn’t managed the same longevity. Across the open room but one platform down, between two catwalks, the copper kettle gapes its maw at you, like it’s yawning out of boredom from not having any wort to boil. When you look back again, it’s physically unchanged, but this time it looks like it’s laughing, grinning, very pleased with itself that it gets to make beer soon, and you don’t.

Without much else to show, Lynne’s green shirt descends again, this time pointing out the tubes and valves that carry the wort from the kettle onwards, to the “basement” of the brewery. This basement turns out to actually be on the ground floor (but still lower than the kettle) where like massive pans of rising bread, the beer ferments in open top containers. You resist the urge to dive into the feet-deep krausen froth, but flash Lynne a cheeky smile. She laughs, like she can read your mind. As she moves the tour forward, you sneak into a side room to admire the neatly lined up samples of various beers; quality assurance turned art, accidentally.

Finally gravity’s natural decline brings you to the logistical heart of the brewery, where some more familiar processes and equipment greet you with shining brilliance. But while the stage may look the same, the actors play different roles; where an American brewery worker protects and primes kegs with shields of C02, these casks are filled with fresh, uncarbonated beer, giving them a shelf life of a few weeks, not a few months. The casks look fatter, jollier than their American counter parts, with a round hole that must be plugged and hammered to keep the beer inside from the harsh oxygen outside. The full casks travel down a conveyor to awaiting trucks, who, if everything goes to pubby plan, will return, empty, to the brewery in fewer than thirty days.

Back in the Black Bull, Lynne lets you sample the products of the mashing Masham marvel you just toured, pulling third pints into branded glasses, letting the creamy head settle, then explaining the recipe behind each. A pale, subtly citrus wheat beer plays guest this month, mainly in celebration of the large bicycle ride that passes through Yorkshire each summer. A roasted barley number called “Smooth Dark – Extra Cool” is not very cold compared to American beer, but that hardly matters as your head swims in the delicate balance of coffee, chocolate, and sweet grain. The rest of the line up echoes English brewing tradition; heavy malt melodies with very, very subtle hop accompaniment, smooth, low alcohol, all approachable, none too challenging for even a novice palate. You try to pick a favorite, but can’t really, because they’re all so exotic when put head-to-head against the 7% ABV, aggressively hopped IPAs of home. Each is very good, and you half-plan how to get a cask past those pesky TSA agents on your trip home.

Noting your fascination and legitimate interest, Lynne lets you pull some pints. She invites you back behind the bar, something you’ve never done before (especially not in a brewery taproom in England), and gives you a quick tutorial on the “two hard pulls” needed to first set the head, then finish filling the glass. The engines feel substantial and heavy, even sticky, and each satisfying pull connects the muscles in your arm to the beer itself, makes you feel like you earned that beer, didn’t just have some forced gas rush through a line and dump it into the glass for you.

You don’t really want to leave. There’s something in the whimsy, in the deliberate, old-fashioned methods that speak to you, remind you that every pint you sip carries with it ancient tradition. You thank Lynne, who oddly thanks you back, and make your way for the door. Before you leave, you grab two souvenirs – a pair of half-pint glasses with the Theakston logo printed on the side. The rules of the airline may not allow you to check a full cask of beer, but you’re pretty sure they’ll be OK with you carrying your memories on, 10 ounces at a time.

See below for a full gallery of the brewery tour.

The Session #92 – I Made This

(This bout of beery banter comes to us from Jeremy Short of Pintwell. The topic: how homebrewing changes your relationship with beer.)

To be unfairly simplistic, the world can be separated into two kinds of people: consumers and makers. They form a complicated codependency, always needing each other to exist but in different ways, two dancers caught up in so dramatic and intense a tango that they often forget who is leading who. The same way an oak drinks the rain to make an acorn that becomes a squirrel’s winter dinner, there’s a natural beauty in the cycle of creation and consumption, and at some point in life a person will play both roles, possibly at the same time.

In a topical coincidence, blogging and homebrewing fall under the same umbrella of creation. They’re the hobbyist’s logical steps towards the professional; the sentence and syntax practice on the path to publication, the mashing and boiling on the boulevard to the brewhouse. To be done well, both require relatively large time (and sometimes financial) investments, with little to no return outside of personal satisfaction and some loose concept that all this practice might be beneficial at some ill-defined point in the future. They are, as far as hobbies go, poorly calculated risks that would make any actuary worth his spreadsheets cringe and run in mathematical terror.

But they do have one advantage that makes up for the sacrificed time and energy: creative freedom. A blogger is left to his own editorial devices, free to write anything he wants with only his experience and sensibilities to guide the quality. A homebrewer is free to brew whatever she doesn’t see on tap, let her recipes run wild down the weird and winding paths of unusual adjuncts, hybrid styles, and potentially disastrous ingredient additions. Concerns about commercial viability matter little to the spinner of homegrown tales and bottler of homegrown ales; they’re making for the sake of making, which some might argue, is the purest pursuit there is.

All of this is to say that bloggers and homebrewers are simultaneously consumers and makers, existing in a limbo between the two distinctions, giving them unique perspective on their craft. A blogger with bookish dreams will balance writing with prodigious reading, analyzing structures and themes, just as a homebrewer might sniff and swirl a beer at the bar in a search for potential defects. While mastering the making side, a person has to learn what defines “good” in their field, and imitate, emulate, sometimes downright copy, all to find their own style, which has its roots buried deep in knowing the product and process well. To make, one must first consume. To truly appreciate what you’re consuming, it’s important to know how it’s made.

By transitioning from full-fledged consumer to fledgling maker, you get to see, maybe only briefly, that border where the two worlds meet.

There’s a drawback though. By committing yourself to learning the delicate intricacies of how a product is made, you’re fundamentally altering how you view that topic. After learning to revise grammatically and syntactically, I struggle to read books without trying to analyze the sentences, wondering how and why the author wrote them that way. When I drink a beer, I’m often spending more time considering its constituent malty and hoppy parts as the brewer in me takes over, not just letting it slide down my gullet with simple satisfaction. Once you learn you cannot unlearn, which may (if your mind works anything like mine) somewhat ruin the enjoyment of the product you had when you were only a consumer.

But what you lose in enjoyment, you make up for in the satisfaction of creating something that other people enjoy. It’s a fair trade, I think. The life of a maker is not for everyone, and that’s a good thing, because the aforementioned codependency would fall apart if the maker had no one to make for. Blogging and homebrewing have changed how I approach two of my favorite things in this life, to the point where “I read this” and “I drank this” are less important to me than the simple and inclusive “I made this.”

“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Big Beer Conspiracies – The Shock behind the Top

I wore my finest tinfoil hat a few weeks ago when I probed the malty innards of Miller’s marketing monstrosity, Fortune, but that entire post was built from my own subjective interpretation of events. I had no proof of my assertions, just a hunch, an inkling, a little trickle of doubt that I saw turning into a deluge of truth at some point in the future.

But this time around, my crazy conspiracy actually has some tangible heft (in the form of documentation). I found a mangy little JPEG bouncing around Twitter and can’t attest to it’s veracity, but it certainly looks real enough, and if not just a clever piece of satire, reaffirms a lot of what I’ve thought about Big Beer’s approach for a long time now.

Shocking Top

Anyone who has ventured deep into the dusty aisles of beer stores of late knows about Shock Top. It’s right there in cans and bottles, sixers and mixers, the silly anthropomorphic slice of orange logo grinning at you from his banner of “Belgian White.” It’s popularity (and in turn production) surged 61% in 2011-2012, and it surpassed all the other rapidly expanding breweries, like Lagunitas and Bells.

The beer is right smack in the middle of what I’d very scientifically describe  as “meh.” But I’m not here to bash the beer. It’s not to my taste or something I’d buy, but a lot of people like it (if sales figures are to be trusted) and I’m not one to objectively analyze subjective wants and likes.

No, let’s leave the beer itself out of this. Instead, let’s focus on the creeping, sneaking message behind the beer.

It’s something a lot of those with their ear to the brewery floor have known for a long time: Shock Top lives a dirty, dirty lie. Like it’s competitive brethren, it wants you to believe that it was crafted delicately, intentionally, by a local, small brewery who cares about their beer and their customers. A meticulously crafted campaign dances on the beer store stage like an ornate Kabuki mask, distracting you, deceiving you, convincing you that you’re buying into the decadent world of craft beer every time you walk out of the store with a twelve pack of Shock Top on your arm.

Shock Top is owned and brewed by Labatt and ABInBev (a massive conglomerate that holds 47.2% of the beer market share in the US), not some local, small, craft brewery. The majority of people associated with beer already knew this, and the merits of “pseudo craft beers” have long been argued and analyzed in the “craft vs. crafty” debate. Most of the argument comes down to economics, with the Brewer’s Association (I might argue rightfully) not wanting the massive behemoths of beer cutting into their market share with dubious advertising strategies instead of competitive products.

But the “problem” with crafty beer was nebulous and hard to pin down, especially when trying to explain the differences between Shock Top and say, Allagash White, to the non-brewing savvy public. There was little to go on other than, “it’s brewed by a huge corporation and that makes it evil beer or something.” The defenders of small and local didn’t exactly have the strongest rhetorical basis in the world.

Until now.

Proof! Long beautiful proof

This image appears to be a “Connections Brief” from Labatt/ABInBev regarding their marketing plans for Shock Top. While jargon-stained copy is typically boring and inconsequential, this particular document reveals a lot about how Big Beer views its consumers, and how they view beer, as a commodity, in general:

The main (and really only) ruse that Shock Top intends to perpetuate is that it comes from a “small brewer.”

This is the beating heart of the hideous beerbeast, the one thing it must do to continue feeding on the consumer dollars it needs to live. For a while, you could have considered that a side-effect of that brand, or some other unlucky coincidence, but here we see that this behavior is deliberate and intentional, the malicious brain child of an earnings report meeting and the executive board.

Regardless of how the beer tastes or if you like it, Labatt/ABInBev is lying to you to sell its product.

Sure, it’s lying by omission (as they’re not actively denying that Shock Top is brewed by a big company if you look into it), but it’s still lying. And that, as a consumer with dollars to spend, should piss you off. They want you to believe this came form that little guy down the street, the one who poured her entire life into a small business, who just wants to brew good tasting beer and sell enough of it to make a living doing what she loves. I’ve got news for you: the average small brewer doesn’t use phrases like, “drive penetration with Experience Maximizers in the “Reward Myself” need state.” 

I mean holy shit, they don’t even call it beer, they call it “approachable liquid.”

Bad gets worse

Perhaps even more egregious than the omission of key information is the fact that Labatt is playing into the “craft beer is confusing and intimidating” idea. Their anecdotal drinker, “Matt,” claims (in rather palpably business-like tones) that most craft beers are too pretentious for him to even try them. This is Labatt swinging a baseball bat and hitting two demographics squarely in the jaw in the same follow through. First, they’re insulting their own demographic, suggesting they’re not sophisticated or educated enough to make their own choices about what to drink, and second, they’re insulting those who do choose to drink other beer, dismissing them as pretentious assholes.

To finish off this cavalcade of corporate shenanigans, Labatt has a plan to continue to “maintain micro/craft credentials” even though it doesn’t have any to begin with. Their entire campaign to sell an incredible 40% more beer is built off of the backs of all those small business based breweries (some who are still struggling financially), riding the “craft beer revolution” without actually adding anything to it, and literally cashing in on an insane amount of money in the process.

The whole point of this renaissance in beer is to give beer enthusiasts higher quality, better tasting options. It’s also sort of a grassroots resurgence in supporting local small business, giving back to your community economically, saying hell no to big-box and hell yes to family owned and run. Labatt doesn’t care about that. They don’t care about local economies, and more importantly they don’t care about the people they’re foisting their product on.

To the brewer down the street who puts a little bit of her own soul into every batch she brews, you’re a valued customer keeping her business afloat. To Labatt, ABInBev, and all the other big beer guys, you’re just a wallet that they need to set to the “Reward myself” need state.

And now we have the proof.

As an added bonus, I managed to find the original tracked changes version of the Connects Briefing with some notes that didn’t make it into the final:

(For the record, this last image is a recreation and a poor attempt at satire, I’m not some amazing hacker who can find old documents. Sadly, scarily, the original document is real as far as I can tell.)