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Beer Outmaneuvering Wine

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beer-vs-wine
Here’s some interesting news from the wine world, h/t to Jenn Litz from Craft Business Daily. Charles Gill, who runs Wine Metrics, which creates “on-premise wine distribution information in the U.S. market.” According to Litz, Gill has been saying lately that he believes that craft beer is taking market share from wine, which is curious, because “trade show rhetoric has often been the exact opposite.”

On Gill’s blog, Wine List USA, he claims that Craft Beer is Outmaneuvering Wine, and lists ten ways in which he believes that’s happening. Here’s his raw list.

  1. Value
  2. Innovation
  3. Promotion
  4. Community
  5. Venues
  6. Cross-Fertilization
  7. New Traditions
  8. Customer Loyalty
  9. Food Compatibility
  10. Gatekeepers

For a better understanding of that list, read his explanations for each one at the source, 10 Ways Craft Beer is Outmaneuvering Wine. I don’t tend to think about wine and beer as an us versus them proposition, but obviously the pie that is all alcohol consumption is divided into wedges of how much is spent on each type. There’s no getting around it. If more people buy beer, something else isn’t doing as well. It’s theoretically possible that the pie is just growing and people are buying more beer, but are not buying less wine, spirits, cider or what have you, but that’s not exactly realistic. If anything, the pie’s been shrinking, sad to say, as people are drinking less overall than they used to.

As to Gill’s list, I definitely agree with Value, Innovation and some of the Community aspects he mentions. And I also think Food Compatibility and most of what he says about New Traditions ring true, but I’m less convinced by the others. Do you agree? Or Disagree? If, so why, and to which ones?

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Time For An Utepils

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norway
The trivia website Dose recently had a list they posted of 21 Words That Don’t Exist In English, But Should. Essentially they’re words in other languages for which there’s no English equivalent, which Dose argues should be added to our dictionaries. Given our history of liberal “borrowing” of foreign words, I can’t see why not. The one word that caught my attention was Utepils (pronounced “oot-er-pillss”), a noun meaning “to sit outside on a sunny day enjoying a beer.”

According to the book “The untranslatables’,” by C. J. Moore, “you have to live through the long dark months of a Norwegian winter to appreciate the annual Norwegian rite of utepils. Literally it means ‘the first drink of the year taken out of doors.’ Easter is barely past, with its tradition of hyttepåske — your Easter visit to your remote cabin — and the days are at last getting longer. Although it’s still practically freezing, everyone is queueing up to invite you to a first utepils get-together ar their favourite bar.

Apparently that’s not exactly correct, and a native Norwegian writing a blog entitled An Enthusiast’s Lexicon, describes utepils more fully:

Actually, utepils simply means any beer enjoyed outside, at any time of the year, but it is true that the first one of the season is a much anticipated ritual. You know spring is on its way when norwegians brave the chilling temperatures and gather around their pints, sometimes even wrapped in blankets. The practice continues throughout the year though – nothing says summer like utepils.

The word itself is made up of two words, ute (‘outside’) and pils, which is simply short for Pilsner, the type of lager beer most commonly consumed in Norway. Interestingly, pils is also used as a slang verb (‘å pilse’), meaning simply ‘to drink beer’. So when you are getting together for an utepils you are pilsing.

Anyway, as our weather in Northern California has been decidedly warm the last few days, I think it’s time I sat out on our back deck, basking in the sunshine with a beer in hand, and enjoyed me a good old-fashioned Utepils. Who’s with me?

Utepils

Bamforth Beer Cartoons

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comic-strip
Having lived on this side of the pond my whole life, I’d never encountered Bamforth’s comic postcards until very recently. The Bamforth company is still in business, but apparently was founded in 1904 as a photography and film studio to make picture postcards, and by the end of the First World War was producing 20 million postcards each year. In 1910, they started creating the comic art postcards. Over the next 90 years, approximately 50,000 comic designs were published, with most of them by just four staff artists — Douglas Tempest, Arnold Taylor, Philip Taylor and Brian Fitzpatrick — along with a few additional freelance artists, like the well-known Donald McGill. According to their history, “by 1960 Bamforth Postcards had become the world’s largest publisher of comic postcards.”

Bamforth’s Postcards were the market leader throughout the twentieth century. Their artists poking fun at every aspect of human activity. They commented on politics, fashion and the changes in social activity and perhaps most famously they invaded the toilet and the bedroom. Sex, in various guises and disguises, was the main subject from the start of the genre.

While sex and being “cheeky” may have been their main focus, beer also figured prominently in quite a few of their postcards.

Bamforth-2045

Quite a few were part of their seaside series, meant to be sent home from vacations.

Bamforth-0929

And still others were just odd.

Bamforth-unk-gas-pump

I’m sure there were many more involving beer, and there were also quite a few depicting pub life. Just poking around eBay and the web, I found a few beer-themed postcards, which you can see in the slideshow below. Enjoy.

Superhero Beer

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JLA
Look, up in the sky … it’s a bird … it’s a plane … it’s a beer? Here’s a fun design project by Orlando, Florida graphic designer Marcelo Rizzetto. He’s taken the superheroes from the Justice League of America (JLA), and designed a beer for each of them. He’s calling the series Super Hero Beers, and so far he’s done seven of the members (eight counting the twins), with more promised.

JLA-beers

While Rizzetto is a professional graphic designer, this project was undertaken just for the fun of it. In trying to imagine which beer might represent each superhero, he’s made a few missteps with the names of the beers, but overall it is a lot of fun to see.

I can’t imagine Warner Brothers (who owns DC Comics, which in turn owns the characters) would ever license any alcoholic product for the JLA, because they’ve been very fussy about it, even recalling the cover of Action Comics #869 in 2008 because it showed Superman possibly sharing a beer with his stepfather. But in 2012, inside of Actions Comics #15 (Vol. 2) Superman is shown drinking a toast with a bottle of wine, so perhaps they’ve relaxed a little about that.

Batman: The Dark Beer (Dark Ale Beer)
JLA-batman

Superman: Super Strong Beer (Strong Pale Lager)
JLA-superman

Aquaman: Aqua Beer (Belgian Blond Ale)
JLA-aquaman

Wonder Woman: The Wonder Beer (Premium American Lager)
JLA-wonder-woman

Green Lantern: St. Patrick Green Beer (Pale Ale)
JLA-green-lantern

The Flash: The Flash Beer (Irish Red Ale)
JLA-flash

The Wonder Twins, Zan and Jayna: Twins Framboise (Lambic Framboise)
JLA-twins

Next Session Mixes Things Up, Beer Mostly

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session-the
For our 88th Session, our hosts are Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey, from Boak & Bailey, who I’m happy to say stepped up to fill in the void that was the June Session. For their topic, they’ve chosen Traditional Beer Mixes, and have suggested several options for participating in the June Session:

In his 1976 book Beer and Skittles early beer writer Richard Boston lists several:

  • Lightplater – bitter and light ale.
  • Mother-in-law — old and bitter.
  • Granny — old and mild.
  • Boilermaker — brown and mild.
  • Blacksmith –stout and barley wine.
  • Half-and-half – bitter and stout, or bitter and mild.

We’d like you to drink one or more from that list and write about it on Friday 6 June… and that’s it.

beer-and-skittles

We’re deliberately aiming for something broad and accessible, but there is one rule — no ‘beer cocktails’! It’s been done, for starters. So, mix two beers, not four; and steer clear of syrups, spirits, flavourings and crushed ice.

If you need further inspiration…

  1. Try ordering them in a pub — do bar staff still know the ropes?
  2. Use your own sources to find a traditional mix not on Boston’s list, e.g. Ram’n’Spesh in Young’s London pubs.
  3. Make the same mix with several different beers — are there rules for the optimal Granny?
  4. Experiment — Blacksmith IPA with black IPA, anyone?

So start mixing things up. On Friday, June 6, D-Day will also be Mix-Day. Let them know when your post is up either by commenting on their announcement page, emailing them at boakandbailey@gmail.com, or tweeting your post.

beer-and-beer-mix

The Effect Of Color On Taste

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color
I’ve seen several different studies examining the effect of the color of food or a beverage on how it tastes. But this is the first one I’ve seen where they’ve looked at the color of the room in which the tasting is held. This study used wine, but it would undoubtedly be the same for beer, or any other drink. It certainly makes sense that your environment would effect the experience of tasting. Or as this short article in Drinks Business puts it, the “environment in which you experience a wine has a ‘profound’ effect on how you will perceive it to taste.” The study, conducted by Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, concluded that “Lighting and music can act as digital seasoning for food and wine.” I”m not quite sure about sound, but perhaps. Anyway, it brings up all sorts of possibilities about how we taste, and where. I’d certainly like to see more of this kind of research.

colored-rooms
Be careful what room you drink in, especially what color it is.

Beer Glassware Catalog 1892

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stein-dimple
Here’s an interesting historical artifact. It’s a trade catalog for bars and restaurants from a company in New York, the L & M Goldsticker company, which published an “illustrated catalogue” of “bar room glassware and bottlers supplies” in 1892.

Here’s the cover of the 80-page catalog:

Goldsticker-cover

And the back cover shows the brick and mortar store on Fulton Street in New York City.

Goldsticker-back

They carried a surprising array of beer glasses for the discerning bar, including some for specific types of beer, along with a number of other accessories and equipment. You can see the entire catalogue online at the Hagley Digital Archives. Below is a majority of the pages with beer glasses on them.

Pages 6 and 7:
Goldsticker-pg-6-7

Page 12:
Goldsticker-pg-12

Pages 14 and 15:
Goldsticker-pg-14-15

Pages 16 and 17:
Goldsticker-pg-16-17

Pages 22 and 23:
Goldsticker-pg-22-23

Rusty Crowns As Art

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anchor-rusty-cap
I meant to write about these before, but they got away from me. British photographer — and current Bay Area resident — Charly Franklin is making some amazing art … with rusty beer caps. And not just rusty, but “rusted, bent, discolored and generally distressed.” He’s taking very detailed photos of these crowns and blowing them up large, over three feet in some cases, which gives them almost an otherworldly appearance. Or in Charly’s own words, an “extraordinary quality and graphic dynamic that looks amazing.” And I have to agree. The patina of the rust, along with the colors and texture of the bottle caps looks really cool. Check out some samples.

Here’s a black crown from Lagunitas:
rusty-crown-lagunitas-black

And one from Anchor:
rusty-crown-anchor

Check out the catalog of over 200 different available crowns from breweries around the world, but with quite a few from California and many craft breweries.

Here’s one from Trumer:
rusty-crown-trumer

And other of Sierra Nevada’s Hoptimum:
rusty-crown-hoptimum

Prints are available on framed canvases, in five sizes, including 18×18, 24×24, 30×30, 36×36 and 40×40 inches. Shipping is free within the U.S.

rusty-crown-framed

Finally, here’s two more, starting with Bear Republic:
rusty-crown-bear-republic

And here’s Drake’s:
rusty-crown-drakes

Congratulations To Garrett Oliver On James Beard Award Win

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james-beard
It’s a beautiful sight to see the coveted James Beard Award hanging around the neck of one of our own. On Monday evening, the 2014 James Beard Award for “Outstanding Wine, Beer, or Spirits Professional” went to Garrett Oliver of the Brooklyn Brewery.

beard-medal

Garrett posted the above photo on his Facebook page, and asked his followers to forgive him the sin of “posting about something you’ve won.” Under the circumstances, I don’t think his disclaimer was necessary. This is the type of big time award that should be crowed about. Without question, it’s a terrific achievement for Garrett, but it’s also an important accomplishment on beer’s road to respectability and legitimacy as the fine beverage we all know it to be. In his typical erudite fashion, Garrett reflects on the award, and what it means for beer.

Last night I was named “Outstanding Wine, Beer, or Spirits Professional” by the James Beard Foundation. These awards are often called “the Oscars of the food world” and given the star-studded black tie ceremony at Lincoln Center, the description seems apt. I don’t need to tell you that beer has always taken a back seat in these circles, though by rights beer should have arrived here a very long time ago. My esteemed fellow nominees, especially Sam Calagione and my friend David Wondrich, have preached our bona fides from the rooftops for many years. So this shiny chunk of bling is for my Brooklyn Brewery brewing team and for all the 3,000 American breweries making some of the most amazing beverages the world has ever seen. Stand facing the mash tun, get stuck in, and make some magic today. “This thing of ours” is the very best thing in the world.

Well said, and congratulations on a well-deserved award. Chris Lowder snapped the shot below of much merriment after the award ceremony, with a clearly happy Garrett Oliver.

beard-celebrating