Nom De Bier – Starr Hill Habañero King of Hop by Donald J. Trump

This is entry #3 in the series “Nom de Bier” – good beer reviewed by famous auth…er…people (as emulated [or parodied] by me). I do not claim to speak for these authors, nor am I an expert scholar in their particular style, so please feel free to correct/admonish as you see fit.

The following is a transcript of Donald Trump’s rally at the 2016 Great American Beer Festival:

(Patriotic, 80s inspired rock music plays loudly)

ANNOUNCER: Good evening ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce the next president of the United States of America: Donald J. Trump!

(Applause)

TRUMP: This is so. So incredible. Beautiful. Really.

(Applause)

We…we have had, no matter where we go…you know, it’s a movement, folks. This beer thing is a movement.

Well first off, let me just say, and people love this about me, but I know beer. I’ve been around a lot – to so many places, Germany, England, I have a jet. And you know people know me as a beer person. I’ve had all the beers. So many beers. Even ones that no one else has heard of. I know. That’s the thing. I know beer.

(Applause)

It came out recently that we’re at 4000 breweries. Four thousand! We had to send 700 breweries away. We have by far the most breweries. It’s not even a contest.

Can you believe it? All these babies crying about it and the media telling lies. You can’t believe it. You can’t believe the lies. Brewing business is huge. It was a mess but now it’s gonna be huge. We’re gonna make American beer great again.

HECKLER: “American beer is already great!”

(Boos from crowd, Trump signals to security)

TRUMP: Can we get that guy out of here? Jeez.

(Eruption of applause)

You know it’s always the same thing with these people. Unemployment is eighteen percent. Twenty percent. And these guys whine about jobs. The brewing industry made jobs. And we’re gonna create even more jobs. Even Greg Koch called me – he’s a good friend, he loves me – and he said Donald you know what you’re doing is amazing. It’s a movement. And we’re gonna talk about it. Love that guy. Beards are great.

(Applause)

But we gotta be tough with these people. You know. We gotta take back brewing. No more imports. There are eleven million imports in this country and they’re stealing sales from American beers. When Mexico sends beers, it’s not sending its best beers. They’re not sending American IPAs. They’re sending beers with lots of problems. They’re sending lagers. They’re clear bottles. And some, I assume, are good beers.

And how are we gonna fix it?

(Crowd shouts in unison, “Ball!”)

That’s right, we’re gonna make them can their beer with Ball®! We’re gonna make Mexican breweries pay for Ball® too. People say it can’t be done, but we can do it. America can do it. We’ll work with Ball®. Working with Ball® will create jobs. Should only cost, what, maybe four dollars. I can do it for less. Cans are cheap. Maybe three dollars. And there will be a truck from Ball. We get rid of all the imports, and only let the best ones back in.

(Eruption of applause)

But that’s just a start. We need American breweries to win again. None of this second to China. China. American beer will win again. People wanna hear the truth, so we’re gonna talk about that too.

We have a disaster called the big lie – distribution, distribution. Yesterday it came out that costs are going, for people, up 39, 39, 49 and even 55 cents a six pack. The price of bombers is through the roof. You literally have to get hurt during a brewery tour and sue to afford anything, it’s virtually useless. It’s ridiculous. un-American.

(Applause)

But there’s beer here, good beer. That’s cheap and not made by China. I know because I have tasted all the beers. When I was in Virginia – great state, great people. Virginians love me. I got this beer from Charlottesville. It’s got peppers. Peppers. Peppers in beer. Only in America. It says “king” on it, so you know I like it.

(Laughter)

It’s good. You know. Big. Bold. American. There are hops. So many hops. This beer isn’t a sissy loser. You won’t see Hillary Clinton drinking this beer. She’d say “ooooh, it’s too spicy” and the lie and say it wasn’t spicy. It’s spicy.

(Mr. Trump pantomimes Mrs. Clinton waving her hand in front of her mouth to cool it down, followed by laughter and applause)

OK. OK. You know? I’m just saying this beer is good for America. What? It’s a great beer. I know great beer. Seven point five percent. That’s huge. Huge. Better than our GDP under Obama. It’s a winner and we’re all gonna win soon.

(Applause)

Bernie Sanders, President Obama, I highly think you should drink this beer quickly. It might teach you something about America, OK. You know, America? But the media won’t report this. They hate me, the media. They hate the truth. Very dishonest people. Print this. Print this. Drink this beer. It’s American. Not an import. We don’t want imports here. Drink this beer. They won’t print that.

(Laughter, applause)

But don’t sit back and just say, Donald Trump is doing well. Trump will save breweries. The more we can win by, you know, the more power we have in a sense, because it’s like a mandate. But you have got to go out and buy beer. And I will tell you this. It has been an honor to be here, I love this beer, I love the people here. It’s been an honor.

But we will make America great again, I promise. Thank you.

(Uproarious applause and yelling, partially drowned out by patriotic 80s inspired rock music)

Grammarian’s note: I reviewed transcripts and videos of Trump’s recent debates and rallies, and found several consistent syntactical patterns. His grammar is canonically wrong in many ways, but his off-the-cuff speaking style masks a lot of errors until you actually see them written down in transcripts. He relies heavily on repetition, single word fragments, unqualified superlatives, and simple sentences. The language tends to be vague and full of generalities, and because he rarely uses transitive verbs, feels plodding and choppy. When he does use compound or complex sentence structure, it’s usually with periodic, middle-branching sentences that include non sequitur information. Occasionally, he will structure a sentence with an introductory clause or phrase, but then not finish the thought syntactically, ending abruptly before moving on to the next sentence. There’s also a lot that is difficult to classify, so I’ll just say it reads sort of like Hemingway if he’d recently been struck in the head by a tire iron.

Nom de Bier – Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter by HP Lovecraft

This is entry #2 in the series “Nom de Bier” – good beer reviewed by famous authors (as emulated by me). I do not claim to speak for these authors, nor am I an expert scholar in their particular style, so please feel free to correct/admonish as you see fit.

Beer Review – Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter
Style: American Porter
ABV: 6.0%
IBU: 37

By: HP Lovecraft

They claim to have found me wet, alone, and gibbering nonsense on that lightless southern shore of the Superior. I could not find in my memory a name, nor a station, but my clothes betrayed my identity. It seems that against all odds, I was the lone survivor of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

In relaying the specifics of how I, and only I, got there, I can say little. The official investigation found the freighter had taken on water some seventeen miles from the Michigan shore, and there gone down in the fury of a southward storm. I remember it differently, but my attempts to explain are discounted as the ravings of a man whose mind was broken by stress and loss. The flashes of truth that do return to me in the deep midnight, are admittedly, things so fantastic and terrible they evade common belief.

My name was given back to me on November 29, 1975, after several weeks in a Detroit hospital. I had been John Bailey of Duluth, Minnesota, deckhand of that now great wreck, but the other details of my life seemed vague and otherworldly. A result of a severe knock to the head claimed my doctors, despite no clear wound or laceration to confirm their diagnosis. My records say I was born in 1949 to a Paula and Michael Bailey, just outside the tiny Massachusetts port of Innsmouth. The place feels right, but the age feels wrong, and the mirror shows me not a man of twenty-six, but one of a much, much older countenance.

I’ve been questioned by countless police and government officials, all trying to ascertain exactly what happened that night. What pieces of reality stitch back together coherently tell me our Captain, the affable but quiet Ernest McSorley, had control of the situation despite the severity of the storm. We’d joined with another freighter – the Arthur Anderson I’m told – and the two ships had been working in tandem to navigate and ride out the worst of the crests. The storm surged fiercely, of that there is no question, but not so fiercely I do not think, as to wrestle control away from our captain and sink the ship on those desolate shoals.

To placate the glimpses of madness that routinely overtake my psyche, or perhaps to assuage my guilt of being a lone remainder of the crew, I drink. I hear the slanders upon my intellect slung from those righteous locals, know their callous disregard for my situation, but pints of strong porter have been my only refuge. I find now why the sailors of old London so loved and relied on the brown ale; it fortifies like no other, physically, mentally, and spiritually. My constitution fares poorly with whiskey, and something about the lore and history of this brew calls to me through endless bubbles, muffled but undeniable.

In my sober hours, I have been reading about the ship before the storm. Most authorities seem obsessed with what happened on November 10, 1975. My concern is that the fate of the ship was decided well before that, when it took on its cargo, and me, in Duluth on November 7. But of this, for now, I can say nothing without risking another trip to the resident psychologist, who already questions the strength of my mind.

As typical, we’d been hauling taconite ore from the Minnesota quarries. Normal fare, massive tonnage of quartz and iron, all to fuel the precambrian fossil fuel monstrosity that held sway over the lake-tied cities. Occasionally, our manifest would include sundry other materials from locations generally undisclosed. Questions were rarely asked as ore was ore, boring, heavy rock valued for its mineral content and little more.

One entry on the manifest from November 7 caught my attention and sent me down this path of incredulity and insanity. A single load of wooden crates, otherwise nondescript and banal, had been marked as coming from “Northern Canada/Greenland” making it an anomaly among the other loads of clearly domestic rocks. I’m sure our head of logistics thought nothing of it, and our Captain, so close to his retirement, most likely wanted to be underway as soon as possible.

The information in the ledgers, the wooden crates, their mysterious contents, seemed familiar, and personal. My head reeled from memories lashing out of my unconscious. I felt faint, and sought out drink, hoping to silence my mind for at least one more night.

I awoke sometime later, head pounding and stomach lurching. But when I could not find my feet, I found it was not intoxication, but that the floor was moving beneath me. Undulating with sudden jerks that knocked me back onto a sparsely covered bunk. The wind yowled against the bulkhead and all at once I heard men cry out while thunder broke the black sky. The men on deck shouted that we’d struck something, been run aground by the storm’s power. But I did not look over the rails. My mind pull me down, into the imposing dark of the ship’s hold.

There, in the otherwise pitch black, the wooden crates hummed and hissed, putting off a pale blue glow that just barely made their outline visible. The rocking of the ship had dislodged them from their fastenings, and one had fallen from high to the steel deck below. Using a flashlight from near the doorway, I threw some light over the cargo, but had to grab a railing to stable myself when I saw the now exposed, spilled contents.

A dark ooze seeped from shattered glass bottles, pooling out in all directions unnaturally, defying the flow of any liquid I’d ever seen. I moved closer to inspect and noticed that it seemed warm and pulsating, characteristic of something alive. I passed the beam over the largest pool and looked deep into the shiny viscous mess; it sparkled a dizzying show, millions upon millions of dots of light tearing through space at dazzling speeds, the cosmos contained in a fluid window through which I viewed impossible infinity.

The humming and hissing intensified. Something deep and forgotten in my body pulled at me, commanded my mind and muscles, and told me, in a tongue I’d never heard by somehow understood, to drink. I cupped the horrid stuff between my hands, letting it slip and drip through my fingers, before putting it to my mouth and swallowing voraciously.

I staggered back onto deck to hear the men screaming to abandon the freighter. The sounds from below now sang across the night sky, and in the eye of the great storm, countless stars, more than man could count, pierced any remaining clouds. Below, the liquid had seeped out from a crack in the hull, floating on the water like an oil slick, pulsating harder and more visibly. There was a great rumbling from below and the water churned into a froth, the stars above becoming so bright that the night could have been day.

A huge, misshapen mass rose from the waves. It smashed down across the center of the ship, snapping it cleanly in two. I heard screams for half a second then…quiet. The ship gurgled as it filled with water, while all around me the sinister ooze formed a perfect mirror to the star-stained space above.

That’s the last I remember. The drink has brought me back to that night, dulled my mental protections enough to let that reality of that night come out. The memory was more vivid than a dream, but less attached than waking reality. I dare not tell anyone what I think to be the truth as I know how they’d respond, and what they’d probably do with me.

Every sip I take reminds me of that sip I took. I cannot stay. For some reason I’m pulled from this life to another. I’m headed north and do not plan to return.

Grammarian’s note: Syntactically, Lovecraft’s style was dense and overwrought, with heavy use of adverbs and adjectives. He wrote in the early 1900s, so the high rhetoric of his writing wasn’t totally unusual, even if it seems so in retrospect to modern readers. I tried to mimic his sentence patterns too, as he’d often go from a simple right-branching sentence right into a packed left-branching sentence with numerous adverbial clauses. Thematically, he wrote about dark, cosmic horrors that had lived eons before humankind but still existed as shadows of history and lore in certain parts of the world. He loved to use obtuse foreshadowing where the narrator established himself as unreliable due to personal madness, typically caused by their connection to some ancient, brooding evil. He also had a bit of a gruesome obsession with the ocean, and what secrets it could possibly contain.

Nom de Bier – Samuel Smith Yorkshire Stingo by William Shakespeare

This is entry #1 in the series “Nom de Bier” – good beer reviewed by famous authors (as emulated by me). I do not claim to speak for these authors, nor am I an expert scholar in their particular style, so please feel free to correct/admonish as you see fit.

Beer Review – Samuel Smith Yorkshire Stingo (barrel aged)
Style: English Strong Ale
ABV: 8.0%
IBU: 30-35

By: William Shakespeare

Sonnet CLV

From bottom where Eros did spring his Sting,
Through much bubbly affair rose sweet head, O;
But focus nay on bubbles should the tale sing,
Instead in oaken planks dark fruits do grow.
A Smith named Sam, a hero born into
Malten cavalcades proceeding to tun;
Man and Nature together set to brew,
And what yeast embark may ne’er be undone.
An odd thing though this, partly tongues note sour –
By work of raisins and spry, teeming wood –
It dances reliquary, somber, dour;
As if mourning a time long passed, lost good.
A tribute, nay, an homage aged old,
Captured in glass, for you to pour, to hold.

Sonnet CLVI

That god not settled with simple ale bliss
Sought more beyond what tradition limits,
As sailors once set eyes on ambergris,
So too did Smith on the cooper’s habit.
And O! How the amber flowed from slick steel,
Down and round bent staves to beer bellies bound,
And here it stayed, a year, flavor made real:
The hold of a ship, full of beer, run ‘ground.
That year much did swirl for yeast finds sleep rare,
And what once was beer in tree’s brace did find
Notes, smells unfettered now but palate fair,
And bitter music played in time with rind.
If one sought brown or pale or stout sweet woe
For neither, nor, and none, this strong ale show.

Sonnet CLVII

Elements conjured forth through Water pure
A tincture; Fire’s bane and Earth’s lament.
On Air life gulped sweet life shy of demure,
And found in liquid our Spirit’s repent.
Ask one now, she, ‘should imbibe or abstain?’
‘All depends’ answer they, ‘what dost thou seek?’
From life from this place, melodic refrain?
Or days left unfulfilled, the same, so weak?
If the latter, fly now, Smith wants you not;
Much rather he’d have a soul gilded bold.
So into your life cast Gambler’s lot
A chance you should take, on true Yorkshire gold.
But also weigh Eros, mission love born,
And weigh too, ones headache come morrow, come morn.

Grammarian’s note: I went with sonnets over a play for brevity’s sake, and because I prefer rhymed iambic pentameter to blank verse. I started with CLV (155) as Shakespeare’s final sonnet was CLIV (154). The structure for a sonnet is 12 rhyming quatrains (ABAB CDCD EFEF) with a single rhyming (GG) couplet as the closing. For more information, check out the basics of his style: http://www.shakespeare-online.com/faq/writingstyle.html

A Beer Review with No Adjectives – Victory Summer Love

Reviews of beer contain adjectives. Lots of adjectives. An abundance. An overflow. Supernumerary manifest.

A challenge arose on Twitter. I accepted. I present to you a review of a beer using no adjectives. I will try not to have clauses or phrases with adjectives, either. Articles, fragments, intensifiers, nominatives, prepositions, interjections, summatives, resumptives, appositives, and adverbs remain.

Victory Summer Love Ale 

Victory, of Pennsylvania, brews. They mash and whirl and ferment beer, beer destined for mouths of the proud. Of the beers they brew, Summer Love stands a monument. A bottle of freshness, replete with flavor, the summer distilled. When the cap pops, the season starts. Available come Spring, but gone by Fall. You think it a lager, but it esters an ale.

A player swings a bat on the label. The sun rises, rays from a ball, as if sport defines the onset of fun. But not fun, romance. Love. Baseball. Pastels decorate the remainder, outside a block of letters cheering the name. The beer begs a hand, your hand obliges.

The cap contains a rumble of carbons. Cerulean in a circle. The beer slips from the bottle like the Yangtze. Dandelion diffused. Bubbles burp a bouquet; spice in hops – Tettnang, Simcoe, and Citra says Google. In a dune aromas settle. Your tongue pelted by UV-rays. The sun captured and served.

The beer lilts, but the song lacks crescendo. Even with the bright, it lacks layers. Complexity crashes on the backend, leaving tongues wanting. But one can’t detract for aspects out of style; for what it represents, Summer Love taste like drinking gold. IPA-ubiquity shelved to make way for a grandfather of sessions. Five point two percent.

You drink this when the heat reds necks. You slug this to mimic bat meeting ball. You mellow on this as night creeps in on the melody of crickets. Victory hits a homerun.

(Grammarian’s note: this is harder than it might seem at first. You cannot use any intransitive verbs [including any form of “to be”] as the subject complement coming after an intransitive is always an adjective. That leaves you with three types of sentences: 1) S -> V -> DO; 2) S-V; 3) S-V-IO-DO. Without introductory or supporting adjectival phrases, you have heavily rely on prepositional and nominative phrases, or adverbial flair to keep the sentence patterns fresh.)

No adjectives here, either

Beer Review: Flying Dog Dead Rise Old Bay Summer Ale

Wooden mallets strike claws, sending fissures through crabby chitin, exposing the sweet, seasoned flesh beneath. Soft hands meet sharp shells, poking, probing, splitting, snapping; a modest labor for a morsel of meat. Twelve spices form a homogeneous cocktail with light lager and briny boil, resulting in a liquid unique to the summers of the Chesapeake watershed. The crustacean covered newspapers lining the tables tell a new story now, a story that to the outsider sounds like barbaric ritual, but to the native sounds like hallowed tradition.

Despite my international birth, I’m a Marylander. All of my education – from Jones Lane to Johns Hopkins – unfolded in the Old Line state, and I’ve called the marshy lands north of the Potomac home for nearly 25 years. There are those in other parts of the country who don’t understand Maryland’s insistence on maintaining a unique identity; those who find such cultural fervor from a small state cute, or quaint, or some combination there of. But the people of Ocean City, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Salisbury don’t just mindlessly crab and boil or Raven and Oriole, they hold high their state standard, proud that 9th smallest state boasts one of the biggest personalities.

A veteran of the picking art shows a tourist where and how to lift the plate to get at the blue gold in the body, like the master teaching the neophyte who reached the peak all the simple secrets of life. A little girl takes her time, building a mini-mountain of crab to eat all at once, while her older brother yanks white chunks out of cartilage lined crevices with the only tool he needs: his teeth. Corn on the cob sits cooked but idle, waiting for the pile of dusted red delight to give up the spotlight.

Maryland suffers from poorly built sandwich syndrome; its thin landmass pressed between the top bun of Pittsburgh, Gettysburg, Lancaster, and Philadelphia, and the bottom bun of DC, Shenandoah, Richmond, and Norfolk. New York City is only a 4 hour drive from our naval-steeped capital, and a brief jaunt south would have you in North Carolina before the sun fully lowered itself into a western bed. There’s a lot of artisanal bread for Maryland’s meat to contend with, and it knows it needs to taste damn good to get any attention when someone takes a bite of the East Coast.

The notes that haunt the humid air are distant but familiar – bluegrass, country, possibly Jimmy Buffet. The giant stock pot – already full of potatoes and garlic and onions – sits on open flame, slowly rising to boil as a bushel awaits fate. On the shore, seagulls have taken note of the feast, and caw their dinner bells to nearby friends, hoping to snag some scraps after the lungs, mustard, and empty shells have been tossed. As the sun begins to set, the hiss of bottle cap sighs fade into the backdrop of ten thousand cicadas.

You might expect a beer brewed with Maryland’s favorite crab seasoning to be nothing more than a well-marketed gimmick. But Flying Dog, after moving to Frederick after a few years in Denver, is one of the oldest functional breweries in the state. Like Heavy Seas and their nautical flair, Flying Dog understands what it means to be in this state, but also what it means to live in Maryland. What it means to wear purple during football season. What it’s like to contend with a parade of transient traffic as I-95 shuttles people to states external. What it’s like to pay a tax on rain.

Deposits of seasoning get stuck under your fingernails. Little cuts from shards and spikes sting when hands meet soap. The entire process means a lot of work and a lot of clean up, but the rewards, tangible and tantalizing, make the effort seem minor. Those who partake in the rituals of the bay go to bed satisfied, dreaming of food and friends and family and future.

The beer isn’t perfect; the smell hits you like a fishy breeze off of a populated wharf, and the Old Bay spikes a flag into your tongue, marking its savory territory despite the summer ale’s crisp attempt to quickly wash it down. But Maryland isn’t perfect either. It’s a hodgepodge of DC politicians and career fisherman, a swampy land swarmed with mosquitoes and mariners. Its weather can be extreme and unpredictable and relatively slow speed limits lead to some of the worst traffic in the country. But it’s a state that knows who it is, where it stands, and what it likes, by virtue of geographic necessity.

Flying dog tried to brew and bottle Maryland itself. Did it work? That ship’s still at sea. Either way, it’s a flattering homage, and I’m willing to bet a lot of Old Bay junkies just found the perfect partner for a summer romance.

“Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.” – H. L. Mencken

The Big Beer Conspiracies – Miller Fortune is in the Cards

I want to preface this post by saying that I am a normal, rational human being and don’t buy into any conspiracy theories/cryptozoological phenomenon except: Sasquatch, chemtrails, Area 51, Elvis still being alive, the British Royal family being lizard people from space, aliens building the pyramids, the lost city of Atlantis, HAARP, and New Coke.

I definitely didn’t consider the X-Files a very well done, long-running documentary series, so don’t ask (because they’re listening).

::repositions tinfoil hat::

Like any good conspiracy theorist, I’m not going to let finicky facts or dubious data get in the way of what I believe. I’m just gonna go with what my gut (and the chip implanted in my skull) is telling me on this one:

Big Beer (read MillerCoors and ABInBev) is intentionally brewing bad beer to trick macro drinkers into staying loyal to their mainstay beers.

Not following? The proof is right in front of us, we just have to open our eyes to the truth.

Take the new Miller Fortune, for example. The Miller marketing masterminds are throwing every craft-like thing they can at this beer, from its description including “hints of bourbon” (which may or may not be trying to reference the run of bourbon aged craft beers we’ve seen of late), trying to serve it in special glassware, and this direct quote from the press release that suggests this beer will transcend normal drinking somehow:

“With that in mind, we developed Miller Fortune to provide consumers with a unique and deliciously balanced option to elevate their drinking experience.”

They want Joe-Adjunct-Lager to think this is a craft beer. Or at the very least, representative of craft beer. They want every average Miller Lite jockey to pick this up and assume they’re in on the “craft beer scene” by drinking this beer. That’s a key step to this whole, sneaky process.

There’s one fatal flaw that contradicts all of the sleek promotional gimmicks: it tastes like Jersey Devil urine. OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration. It tastes more like hummus that rolled out of a grocery bag in the trunk of someone’s Toyota Prius only to be discovered, fuzzing with green life, some indeterminable amount of time later. No, no, too extreme. But it does have a certain, familiar, wretch-inducing aroma. A taste like a wisp of memory on my tongue, of a time spent blurred, on a college campus but not part of this reality, with large glass bottles taped to my hands.

Ah, yes. Malt liquor. That’s the taste I was looking for.

You could do a blind taste test, and I’d put $1000 dollars on no one, not even the most refined Colt 45 connoisseur, being able to pick out Miller Fortune in a line up with Olde English 800, Hurricane High Gravity, and (my personal favorite) King Cobra. I should also note that MillerCoors owns the Olde English 800 brand, and it may have crossed my mind that all they did was pour some of that into different bottles, garnish it with a fancy ad campaign, and hope no one noticed. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

Even if it is just re-branded 40oz gold, it still doesn’t taste good. I guess the 6.9% ABV is supposed to offset this by sheer factors of drunkification, but if this is supposed to be some new flavor territory just waiting to be charted by adventurous, treasure seeking, beer archaeologists, it fails. This is like Indiana Jones and the Walmart Crusade. A bad idea that should have never left the brainstorming session, horribly executed to the tune of several million dollars.

It’s a bad beer. I think it was brewed that way deliberately. But why? Because craft (or whatever we want to call “good” beer these days) is winning. Slowly chipping away at the market share, slowly stealing Friday-night happy hours and paychecks from the maws of the adjuncted overlords.

And I think they are panicking. Their stranglehold is weakening; the more they tighten their beery grip, the more drinkers slip through their fingers. So they get desperate, and do stuff like this. They get a non-craft drinker to try something new – hey, it’s from their good old friend Miller, after all – with the (secret?) hopes that they’ll hate it.

And when they hate it, what does the drinker do? They form opinions about all craft beer. They tried the “craft beer thing” having downed a few bottles of Miller Fortune. All that “complex flavor” and “bourbon aging” isn’t for them. They don’t need a fancy glass; they still prefer to drink straight from the can or bottle.

Then they go out, buy another 30-rack of Miller Lite, and Miller wins.

Or so Miller hopes.

::puts on anti-radiation suit::

I have to go get the mail.

“We are always in a constant state of conspiracies, at least thats what they keep telling us…” ― Faith Brashear

Beer Review: New Belgium Accumulation

Despite being completely translucent, snow appears white because the crystal lattices of each flake contain so many tiny facets that they diffuses the entire color spectrum on their way to the ground. It’s like a reverse version of the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon falling lazily from the sky a million times over.

But this winter for me, for once, for real, isn’t about the twinkling aggregation of frozen water that piles up so beautifully on my lawn. It isn’t about the trance inducing schizophrenic blinking of the LEDs framing the houses in my neighborhood. It isn’t about the joyful chorus of Bing and Frank and Dean that floats so nostalgically into my ears from every speaker.

This winter is about fingers and keyboards and quiet clacking long into the night. Words, not snow, will fall this winter.

Despite appearing blank, the white background of a newly opened Word document is actually millions of engineered points producing every color as a literal carte blanche. What looks like nothing, a void of anything, is actually everything, all at once.

But this winter isn’t about empty Word documents, or sullen writers block, or bouts of seasonal affective disorder. It’s not about regret or longing, or trying to find meaning in what was otherwise a pretty bleak year.

This winter is about sharp black letters etched into the flesh of a white form, tens of thousands in little lines like mustering soldiers, all waiting their turn to see the front lines.

Despite being called white, a white IPA is more of an opaque gold, giving new meaning to the idea of yellow snow. White IPA is a marriage of the complexity of high hoppage and the effervescence of a wit, all while retaining a singular, unique identity that nods to both styles but lives as neither.

But this winter isn’t about trying to identify as something that already exists. It isn’t about assimilating, or conforming, or finding comfort in the protection of the familiar.

This is a winter of words, of intent, of future; watching my words pile up in drifts, watching the bubbles rise in my glass like an upside down blizzard, watching them accumulate at the top like a pristine, un-walked-through blanket of perfect white.

This is a winter of trying new things. Starting now.

Beer Review: Heavy Seas Davy Jones Lager

All this week my posts will be related to Heavy Seas Beer of Baltimore, Maryland. Why? Because they make great beer, are a local favorite, and were nice enough to let me wander around their brewery for a few hours with a camera. 

Lager yeast and I have never seen eye-to-eukaryote. Every time I brew with it, I’m overly concerned by the lack of quick airlock-action, the diminutive krausen, and the whole needing to keep it cold even though that doesn’t make any logical sense to me. “Bottom fermentation” hides in that foggy part of my brain where I kind of understand what’s going on in terms of beer-science, but also still think it’s some kind of mystic raffinose related ritual.

For a long time, I thought all pale lagers tasted the same. I created a mental association between “lager” and “light,” as if all light beers were lagers, and vice versa. Unless it was something obviously different (like a märzen or a bock), that fizzy yellow-gold stuff all fell safely in the “mowing the lawn on a mid-July Saturday” category. Plenty of refreshment, but not much in terms of complexity. I blame four collegiate years of destroying my taste buds on Milwaukee’s Best Ice.

My fridge – colloquially named “The Beerhome” – is full of ales. That’s sort of its lot in life: a house with the thermostat stuck at 40º, bunk beds ready for several perfectly lined-up rows of stouts, IPAs, porters, and pales. I try to venture into new territory, but the tongue wants what it wants. Lagers don’t usually rent a room in the Beerhome unless 1) I’m having a party, or 2) I just had a party.

I bought Heavy Seas Davy Jones Lager because I’m a pirate. No hyperbole or jokes, I am legitimately a pirate. I have proof:

I’m the one on the right. This is a normal outfit for me.

I’m obligated to try a beer that is pirate themed, even if it’s outside of my normal taste spectrum.

And I’m glad I did.

Unlike other traditional pale lagers, Davy Jones Lager ferments at ale temperatures (~68-70º F), and is then dropped to lager temperatures for the storing process. This is the same process used to create California Steam/Common beer, for those inquiring minds. Warm temperature tolerant yeasts became popular in the 1800s when refrigeration was a luxury not every brewery could afford, especially not during the primary fermentation phase.

The result of this temperature dance is a beer that honors the clear and crisp legacy of other lagers, but also retains fruity esters and complex malt notes. It tends to be creamier than lagers fermented cold, which pleases us picky, ale-centric drinkers. It’s got more up-front hop flavor (a nice citrus bump that I think comes from the Centennials), which is an appreciated departure from the bitter dryness of Czech style pilsners, or any of the American adjunct lagers.

At 6% it’s a bit stronger than you might expect from an “easy drinking” beer, but there are no phenols or fusels present anywhere. Davy Jones has quickly become one of my favorite beers to relax with after work. It’s also a great beer to gently introduce your Bud and Coors friends to the world of craft. Sadly, Heavy Seas only plans to brew it from May-July, so I’ll just have to fill the holds of my ship (basement) with enough to tide me over these harsh Maryland winters.

Heavy Davy Jones Lager Vitals:

• ABV: 6.0%
• IBUs: 30
• Hops: Warrior, Fuggle, Palisade, Centennial
• Malts: 2-Row, Flaked Maize, Wheat Malt, Biscuit

Brew Fiction: Dogfish Head Sixty-One

The cheer rose to crescendo, hovering in the rarefied air just below the mineralized fibers of the dropped-ceiling tiles, and held there, floating in the blueish glow of muted florescence for a single, glorious second before falling back down to polished wood of the twelve parallel lanes. The other eleven had fallen idle as all attention crowded on Lane 9, where Costello had just sent his purple and green swirled 15-pounder sliding towards the brave pins standing like a perfect set of post-orthodontic teeth, sixty feet away.

The ball hooked hard right then scurried left, spinning in a way that seemed to give the middle finger to the laws of physics, crashing into the gap in the front teeth, sending them scattering into the gutters and each other. The ten-pin, a stubborn molar, wobbled drunkenly, unsure whether he’d fall or stand, collapse or correct. The echo of that last tooth dropping filled every bit of free space in Waterford Lanes. Rumor had it you could even hear the sound of the plastic-on-wood clattering and reverberating in the stalls of the men’s bathroom.

And as soon as it was officially down, and the judges deemed no toe had crossed fault line, and no other bowling etiquette or technicalities stood in the way, the screens flashed like two dozen malfunctioning robots, displaying over and over and over again: 300! The same cheer that had collectively burst from Costello’s fans as he hit that eleventh strike, exploded anew, part scream, part yell, part singing celebration of something that is as statistically unlikely as a rookie golfer sinking a hole-in-one on a par 3.

He stood and stared at the robotic arm sweeping away the corpses of the pins, aware but unbelieving, having courted the high 200s for years and years, thinking perfection was impossible. He cracked his knuckles and turned around to face the little boy in an over-sized shirt that matched his. The boy looked at him like a mortal upon a god, eyes glistening with pride, ears covered by his tiny hands to muffle the deafening exuberation all around him. He threw his eight-year old arms as high around Costello’s legs as they’d go, hugging him with the same zeal as a he’d squeeze a new stuffed bear just to show how much he loves it.

Whistles shot from the back of the crowd and a slow chant started, Costello’s surname rhythmically pumping with the pulse of the alley, like his legend, his perfect game, were now part of the beams and dirt and concrete that gave the alley a form. Old Arkansas, the portly and pleasant owner, came and dropped a tall domestic in his hand. “Ya finally did it you son of a bitch!” 

Costello winced and then smiled. “Hey, hey now. Not in front of the kid.” He rustled the mop of blonde hair that was still firmly attached to his legs. He’d done a good job, he reassured himself. The boy, despite his lack of understanding about anything parental, was doing alright. Sure he was a load or four of laundry and a trip to Hair Cuttery away from being truly presentable. But overall, given the emotional toll of the unexpected and unwelcomed, he was growing up strong and smart.

It took a solid hour for the line of congratulants to clear out, each one wanting to shake the hand of the first man to toss a 300 in this place since Chuck Werner did it in ’66. The mob of after-party had dwindled into a few stragglers too drunk to drive, but the energy still buzzed in the air, as real as the Alan Jackson tunes that floated lazily from the dated speakers mounted in the walls. Costello sat with the boy, slowly drinking his beer, letting the silky bubbles roll around his tongue and slide between his teeth before finally swallowing. It was late, even for him, and the little eyes on the little face next to him kept popping open and then slowly closing, defiantly trying to stay awake and hang with the grow-ups.

Midnight chimed it’s inevitable arrival. Costello knew the days of hanging in the alley with Jessica or Cathy or Angela until 3:00 A.M. were over, so he finished his beer and tried to pay Arkansas, who promptly refused. “You kiddin’? That game of yours made me a bundle tonight. Least I can do is give you a beer or two on the house.” He picked up the empties and nodded toward the boy, now curled in the fetal position on the orange plastic chair. “Best get him home and in bed.” Costello scooped up the crumbled sleeping mess of boy, slinging him over his shoulder like an human-shaped sack, careful not to hit his head on the door frame as he carried him out to the parking lot.

As Costello settled the boy into the back seat of the black and rust colored Silverado, he whispered, sleep blanketing his tiny voice, eyes still closed, “Luke, will you teach me how to be a bowling hero?”

♦♦♦♦♦

The bowling alley was as old as the town hall, and featured just as prominently; the thirty-foot Art Deco sign could be seen from almost anywhere in the town. One advantage for advertisers and billboard enthusiasts on Maryland’s east coast: no hills. In the low, stinging sun of morning the alley’s age showed in wrinkles of peeling mint-green paint and growing gaps in the grain of the wooden siding. He stood for a moment in the shadow of the massive sign before looking down at his nephew. “OK Kyle; bowling time! Let’s find you a good, 8 pound ball.”

It took Arkansas nearly fifteen minutes to dig up a pair of kids size 3 bowling shoes, but the lack of wear and scuffs made them perfect for Kyle, like they’d been on reserve for him alone, waiting for him to discover his tokens of destiny and take up shoe and ball like Theseus took up sandals and sword.

Kyle demanded to tie the shoes himself. While he fumbled with the laces and tied about a dozen knots in each, Arkansas pointed behind them both to the new, shiny addition on the wood paneled wall near the entrance. There, next to Werner’s huge sixties mustache and amber tinted glasses, hung a little picture of Costello, right arm up in the air, a candid shot of him as he released the ball for the final strike. The little gold plaque read simply, ‘Luke Costello – Perfect Game – June 1, 1998.’ Arkansas had wasted no time getting that award engraved and mounted, as proud of the achievement and the man as he was happy that it happened in his alley.

“You ready?” Kyle was already on his feet, awkwardly stomping around with the wooden heels of the shoes, showing off how well he’d adhered them to his feet. He wore his over-sized bowling shirt again, nearly refusing to take it off since the victory three nights ago, and looked equal parts absurd and adorable with the line of buttons on the front hanging just below his knees. Costello made him tuck it in; the last thing he needed was for the kid to trip and bust his lip on the slippery wood and carpet. God knows what kind of stuff was growing between the gums stains.

In his typical fashion, Kyle refused to have the bumpers raised and refused to use the chrome-plated ramp-assist, arguing with Costello that he could easily get the ball to the end of the lane, easily get a strike, if he really wanted to and tried. When Kyle became so defiant, so self-empowered and bold, he could see in the boy some of his father, the father before the accident, before the diminishing power of a motionless year in a hospital bed, before his youth and energy had all but drained into the dozens of bags of fluid and blood that collected and dripped in perpetuity.

And when he ran up to that foul-line, stopping just short to let the ball glide out of his hands with inborn grace, short arms guiding the ball skillfully even though no one taught him how, overly long blond hair twirling like the bottom of a loose summer skirt, he could see in the boy some of his mother. The ballerina, the prom queen, the girl so much better than this nothing town, the one going places, so in love with life that even her failures were enviable. The girl he’d loved just as much as his brother had, whose hand he’d held as her soul left that broken body, unable to take anymore of this world.

The ball moved well, but the slick of the polish got under it at the last minute, and Kyle’s attempt only managed to clip the seven pin. He slammed one foot down angrily. “What did I do wrong!?” Costello stepped up behind him, showing him how he’d released the ball too soon, and how that had caused the trajectory of the ball to change dramatically. He held his arm, one hand on his elbow, the other on his wrist, and swung it for him, stopping it in the air where he should release the ball. Kyle’s next throw knocked down eight pins.

Costello let him practice using his frames, not counting those towards his total, knowing Arkansas would give them as many free games as they wanted until the buzz of the perfect game and minor celebrity wore off. He sat and watched Kyle, throw after throw after throw, thinking about how he’d never expected to have this much responsibility. Thinking about how in the vast cosmic swirl of unfair circumstance, he’d become a father because of a rainstorm, had his life injected with sudden parenthood because of a poorly maintained patch of country road and a violent collision of tree and steel.

Kyle threw the last frame, finishing in a huff of disappointment, his ball hitting two pins before disappearing into the black abyss behind the lane. He looked straight forward, and cracked his knuckles, or tried to, like he’d seen Costello do at the end of a game. His confidence morphed into a huge frown as he looked up at the monitor to see his score. “I didn’t even get 100.”

“Well would you look at that” Luke playfully poked Kyle in his side, trying to elicit a laugh and a smile. “The first game I ever bowled was a 61, too.”

In Defense of the Alternative Beer Review

If you’ve been around for some of my Beer Fiction Fridays it’s not exactly breaking news worthy of auto-tune treatment that I don’t write traditional beer reviews. Sure, I’ve written quite a few nonfiction, more review-ish reviews, but even those tend to fall more on the side of narrative story than they do classic, “here’s what I think and why,” no-frills review.

An article from Focus on the Beer had me doing a Ctrl+F on my soul this weekend, delving deep in my psyche and emotional past for the reasons I write beer reviews at all. I think the obvious reasons are because I like beer and because I like to write. The rest just seems inconsequential, the unimportant details that seem to work themselves out without much extra thought.

But I’ve never been the type to actually read reviews of food and drink with an air of seriousness, never acted like the opinion of the critic or reviewer or dude in his basement somehow matters. I do often find my browser landing on Beer Advocate because, hey, checking out what the collective hive-mind thinks can be fun and a hands-on lesson in collective sociology. But I’m pretty sure I’ve never consciously recalled any of those reviews in the liquor store, saying to myself, “beerstud1991 only gave it a 2.63, no way I’m buying that junk.“ I can say with confidence that I’ve never let a beer’s “score” influence whether I’m going to purchase it or not.

Why?

Because taste is subjective. More so, I’d argue, than any other sense. We can pretty much agree (short of color interpretation) that we all see the same things. Aside from the thickness of different ear drums slightly adjusting incoming MHz, we all hear the same things. We can also agree that week-old cat litter smells bad and a freshly baked apple pie smells good. We can even agree that 300 thread count sheets are soft, 60 grit sand paper is rough, and a baby’s butt is the unequivocal standard unit of smoothness against which all other smoothness should be measured.

But taste has few standards; it is permeable, water soluble, in constant flux. Some people out there legitimately don’t like cupcakes. Others legitimately do like tripe.  Every late-to-work scalding coffee burn, every jalapeno charged capsaicin rush, every chewing-too-fast-bit-the-side-of-your-tongue is part of the formula that always equals how you go about tasting, no matter what variables are added or changed.  Your tongue, like a gross pink snake, sheds its skin and taste buds often, reacting to all kinds of things you put in your mouth, making it so you can’t even trust your own opinions over the course of your life.

And because taste is flawed, the classic beer review is flawed. Just because you liked a sextuple dry-hopped Imperial IPA, doesn’t mean everyone else will. Just because your palette isn’t as open to bitters and coffee malts, doesn’t mean that a coffee stout is bad. Reviews will always be biased and tainted by the reviewer’s in-born, unavoidable subjectivity and thus can’t logically be universally valid. There is no basis against which the goodness of a beer can be measured (although the BJCP is certainly trying to establish one) and as a result, what another person thinks about a beer will remain forever nebulous, floating in a foamy, lacey, off-white head of doubt.

I sound like I’m about to give up on the beer review. Far from it. Actually the opposite. The beer review is still a great thing, still has a place in our writing and beer worlds, but maybe not in the traditional Appearance+Smell+Taste+Mouthfeel form.

When you drink a beer, you’re doing a lot more than just putting some water, malt, hops, and alcohol into your body. You’re doing a lot more than just tasting a drink and reporting your findings. You’re becoming part of an ancient tradition that dates back ~10,000 years. You’re joining a enthusiastic community of like-minded brewers, maltsters, yeast-biologists, and hop-farmers who toil away to bring life to a beverage, a drink that has shaped and supported mankind’s rise to greatness like a pint glass supports an ale. You’re raising a glass to salute the infinite muse of alcohol, and sharing good times with your family and friends. Beer is more than the sum of its ingredients, it’s a glorious gateway, a cultural connection.

When you write a review, you’re telling the story of how you made that connection. You’re filling your reader’s head with the same warm, spinning buzz that filled yours, via a story or anecdote or worded snapshot of life. You’re not just telling them about the beer, you’re taking them with you on the experience you had drinking the beer. Write your reviews to show us the truth that was hard-brewed into the beer, the connection to that timeless tradition that inspired you to take bottle-opener to cap in the first place.

Don’t be so caught up in what people expect from a review. If you want to write about the hop characteristics because that’s just your thing, go for it. If you want to write about a memory that this beer brought surging back to the front of your brain, by all means. If you’re like me, and you want to write a story based on the taste and appearance of the beer, don’t let anyone stop you.

Drink what calls to you. Write what the beer inspires you to write.

“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”
― Benjamin Disraeli