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Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Session Beer Day To Be Celebrated April 7

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session
My friend and colleague Lew Bryson is promoting a new holiday, to take place on April 7. Session Beer Day was created to bring awareness to the idea that low-alcohol beers can be every bit as flavorful as their more spirited cousins, beers of average or high alcohol. Lew’s Session Beer Project has been a pet project of his for a few years now, its purpose likewise is “to popularize and support the brewing and enjoyment of session beers.” You can read more about Session Beer Day on Lew’s blog Seen Through a Glass.

While there are no hard and fast rules as to what constitutes a “session beer,” for purposes of the holiday, the focus will be on beers that are 4.5% a.b.v. and below. If you’re a beer lover, on April 7, consider drinking only session beers and making a special point to ask for session beers at your favorite watering holes. Many places don’t even carry any beers that would fit the working definition and this holiday is an opportunity to educate places that aren’t stocking at least one session beer.

If you’re in a position at a bar, pub, brewery, restaurant, etc., consider offering session beer on April 7, perhaps even making a special promotion for the day (or week surrounding) Session Beer Day. You could even really step up and serve ONLY session beers and see how many you can find from your local brewers.

Here’s how Lew describes what to do on Session Beer Day:

If you work at a bar (or manage one, or own one), please consider throwing some under-4.5% beers on for April 7th, and making a special price or promotion for them. Tell folks it’s Session Beer Day, and encourage them to see how good lower alcohol beers can be. (Good day to get a “We Support” window sticker, too!) If you’re a brewer or wholesaler, encourage your accounts to pick up your under-4.5% beers for that day; it’s a great chance to promote those beers! If you’re a beer blogger/tweeter/writer, please consider spreading the word about Session Beer Day: use the hashtag #sessionday . And if you’re a session beer drinker…get out there and ask for it!

If you don’t recognize the significance of April 7, that was the day in 1933 when the Cullen-Harrison Bill, signed into law by FDR on March 23, took effect. Here, I’ll let Bob Skilnik take up the rest of the story:

Congressional events leading up to April 7, 1933 allowed only the resumption of sales for legal beer with an alcoholic strength of no more than 3.2% alcohol by weight (abw), weak by today’s standards. Congress had earlier passed the so-called Cullen-Harrison Bill which redefined what constituted a legally “intoxicating” beverage. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the bill on March 23, 1933. The bill’s passage took the teeth out of the bite of the Volstead Act of 1919 and raised the Prohibition-era legal limit of alcoholic drinks from .05% abw to 3.2% abw.

Bringing breweries back online on April 7, 1933 in states whose legislatures agreed to go “wet” again gave a tremendous shot in the arm of an economy in the throes of the Depression. In just forty-eight hours, $25,000,000 had been pumped into various beer-related trades as diverse as bottling manufacturers to the sawdust wholesalers whose product lay strewn on the floors of saloons. For the first day of nationwide beer sales, it was estimated that the federal tax for beer brought in $7,500,000 to the United States Treasury.

To learn more about this period of history, read Skilnik’s New Beer’s Eve, April 7, 1933. So it seems an appropriate day to celebrate session beers, the day when only session beers were available after thirteen years of no (legal) beer of any kind.

So now you know. April 7 will be celebrated as Session Beer Day. Won’t you you join us?

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If you’re asking yourself if we can just declare any day a holiday, the answer is “yes.” If you’re a regular reader of the Bulletin, you know I’m a holiday geek and list many obscure holidays for every day of the year. Almost all of those are legitimate. Apart from “official” holidays which are voted on by Congress, anyone can declare any day a holiday. The trick is to get others to recognize it. So there are lots of small holidays. Some are self-serving holidays by industries to promote their products. Some are by non-profits hoping to build awareness for their cause. Some are wacky ideas by goofy people (like me) who just want to have some fun. Some are rooted in old traditions and others are just completely made up. Some succeed while others are relegated to the scrap heap of forgotten holidays. Many of the holidays we take for granted, such as Thanksgiving or Mother’s Day, were simply thought up by individuals hoping to promote a good idea and only gained wider acceptance over time. Thanksgiving has only been an annual event since 1863 and Mother’s Day, in its current form, wasn’t made an official holiday until 1914. So any holiday has a chance of becoming a big holiday with Hallmark cards and special traditions to celebrate it as long as enough people buy into it and observe it as a holiday. So Session Beer Day is a holiday if we say it’s holiday. It’s that simple. So this April 7th, make Session Beer Day a reality simply by drinking some session beers. Oh, and don’t forget to celebrate International Brewers Day on July 18.

Drowning One’s Sorrows May Be Genetic

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fruitfly
The March issue of Science, touted as “the world’s leading journal of original scientific research, global news and commentary, included an article entitled Sexual Deprivation Increases Ethanol Intake in Drosophila. Which may not mean much, until you realize that in plain English it’s essentially “fruit flies who’ve had their sexual advances rejected drink more alcohol.” Here’s the abstract:

The brain’s reward systems reinforce behaviors required for species survival, including sex, food consumption, and social interaction. Drugs of abuse co-opt these neural pathways, which can lead to addiction. Here, we used Drosophila melanogaster to investigate the relationship between natural and drug rewards. In males, mating increased, whereas sexual deprivation reduced, neuropeptide F (NPF) levels. Activation or inhibition of the NPF system in turn reduced or enhanced ethanol preference. These results thus link sexual experience, NPF system activity, and ethanol consumption. Artificial activation of NPF neurons was in itself rewarding and precluded the ability of ethanol to act as a reward. We propose that activity of the NPF–NPF receptor axis represents the state of the fly reward system and modifies behavior accordingly.

Science Magazine’s News Blog featured the article in more layman’s terms as Sexually Rejected Flies Turn to Booze, and described the results as follows.

Offer a male fruit fly a choice between food soaked in alcohol and its nonalcoholic equivalent, and his decision will depend on whether he’s mated recently or been rejected by a female. Flies that have been given the cold shoulder are more likely to go for the booze, researchers have found. It’s the first discovery, in fruit flies, of a social interaction that influences future behavior.

Apparently that’s not the outcome the scientists expected.

The researchers expected all of the flies to prefer alcohol, but that’s not what they found. “You see that the mated males actually have an aversion to the alcohol-containing food,” Shohat-Ophir says. “And the rejected males have a high preference to that food with alcohol.” On average, the rejected males drank four times more alcohol than the mated ones, her team reports.

In the New York Times’ coverage — Learning From the Spurned and Tipsy Fruit Fly — they make the leap to human addiction, which I find a little troubling. “Fruit flies apparently self-medicate just like many humans do, drowning their sorrows or frustrations for some of the same reasons.” Which is okay, so far, but then they quote an alcohol addiction researcher who was not involved in the study, Dr. Markus Heilig, who believes the study “also supported new approaches to treating alcohol dependence,” including the investigation of “several compounds aimed at blunting alcohol urges.” And earlier in the Times’ reporting, they state that the study “suggests that some elements of the brain’s reward system have changed very little during evolution, and these include some of the mechanisms that support addiction.”

But that presupposes that the urge to drink alcohol is always bad, something that people should never do, and that it necessarily leads to addiction. And that, of course, it not the least bit true. Once upon a time, it meant the difference between living long enough to procreate and dying without issue. When it was safer to drink than the water, those humans with a greater tolerance for alcohol survived while those that couldn’t did not. If you’re reading this right now, it’s likely you can thank your ancient ancestors’ ability to handle their drink.

Even today, people who drink moderately tend to outlive those who never drink alcohol. Even those that drink heavily still tend to outlive those who never drink alcohol. It’s just that small fraction of the population that cannot handle alcohol and can be considered alcoholics, whether genetic or social or simply weak-willed. And for their failings, the world is cursed with neo-prohibitionists hell bent on the idea if even one person can’t handle alcohol, then dagnabbit no one should be able to enjoy it.

But so much of this type of research seems to play into their hands, making the assumption — very, very wrong in my opinion — that alcohol is bad for people, and bad for society, and that drinking alcohol always leads to alcoholism. It’s usually the starting premise. But it’s a false premise, because the majority of people who drink alcohol do so responsibly and in moderation and do not fall prey to alcoholism after their first (or tenth, or 100th or 1000th) sip.

And like the rejected fruit fly, sometimes a beer is just the thing to help get over a bitter rejection, or just a long, tough day at work. The calming effect of a beer after work or with dinner is part of a healthy lifestyle for many, many people. For a majority of people, there’s nothing wrong with that, and it does not signal the onset of addiction or any sort of problem whatsoever. And that’s my takeaway from the fruit fly, too. Sometimes you just need a beer to drown your sorrows.

drunk-fruitfly

San Francisco Gordon Biersch To Move

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The picturesque location on San Francisco’s Embarcadero of the former HillS Brothers Coffee building is home to the third Gordon Biersch brewpub, which opened originally in 1992. According to Inside Scoop SF, as of the end of April, that will no longer be the case. (And thanks to Pete S. for sending me the link.) Apparently the twenty-year lease expires April 28, and the landlord and Gordon Biersch have been unable to reach an agreement. Gordon Biersch is currently scouting for a new location nearby. So you’ve got a little over six weeks if you want to pay the brewpub one last visit.

Marzen Madness 2012

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basketball
While not the biggest fan of college basketball, I still enjoy March Madness every year. The tournament is usually a fun diversion for a few weeks each year, so for the second straight year, I’ve set up a fantasy game, similar to fantasy football. It’s a bracket game through Yahoo which I call “Märzen Madness.” It doesn’t look like there’s a limit to the number of people who can play, so sign up and make your picks before March 15, which is when the first games take place. I’ll post and update standings each day there’s games played until a winner is declared.

To join Märzen Madness and play the Yahoo! Sports Tournament Pick’em game, just follow this instructions below. You’ll also need a Yahoo ID (which is free if you don’t already have one).

To accept the invitation, just follow this invitation link. For reference, here’s the group information.

Group ID#: 10019
Password: beer

Good luck everybody.

Martha Stewart Declares Beer “The New Thing”

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martha-stewart
I should confess right up front that I’ve never been a big fan of Martha Stewart. I’m not really sure why, but her advice and how she presents it has always bugged me for some reason. I guess for me, it always comes across as trying to be for everyone, the common people, but can really only be followed by people with a lot of free time and money. Even my wife disagrees with me on this one, so I have to conclude it’s just a weird personal prejudice I have about her.

So Stewart was on the Today show this morning in a segment entitled “Bottoms Up! Martha throws a beer party.” And yes, I know it’s great whenever craft beer gets attention from the mainstream media, but the curmudgeon in me just can’t let it pass uncritically. Here’s how it went down.

Matt Lauer begins the segment by saying that “forget the college keg, beer has grown up. Now it’s all about pairing some cold brew with great snacks.” So those are the two choices of what beer can be, “college keg” or “grown-up?” I know it was just an off-hand remark, but sheesh. And being “grown-up” means pairing it with snacks? It just seems like they could do so much better if they really cared about it.

So in comes Martha Stewart, beer savvy housekeeping diva, and declares “a beer tasting party is like the new thing.” That statement reminds me of the actor or musician who finally has a big hit after toiling in his or her craft for thirty years and is suddenly hailed as an overnight success. For millions of people, beer tasting has been a pretty big deal for quite some time now, but now that it’s reached Martha’s notice it’s “the new thing.”

But before she goes too crazy, Lauer reigns her in, suggesting that she “keep it casual, it doesn’t have to be fancy.” Naturally, you should keep it casual, because it would be absurd to suggest otherwise. Stewart, who usually seems at ease in front of the camera, looked unsure of herself talking about the beer, and even appeared to skirt any questions about it.

After showing off the chalkboard oilcloth table cloth where people can use chalk so they “can write their impressions of the beer” right on the table, Lauer asks her what beers are on the table, and guesses, “light, dark and amber.” Stewart replies “yes,” explaining that it’s because “each have a very specific kind of quality.”

When they moved over to the food, she perked up and appeared much more comfortable and at ease. Her demeanor seemed far more confident, since she was now in her element. But the weird thing is, the food seemed much more fancy, with onion jam made with balsamic vinegar and maple syrup and cocktail meatballs with three kinds of meat. That’s not “keeping it casual” to me. So in keeping things “casual” because it’s beer, the food doesn’t stay casual? That seems weird to me. Beer can’t be fancy, but food almost has to be.

In the four and a half minute piece, no more than a minute was about the beer, and in the end, they never got any more specific about the beers than “light, dark and amber,” and that much only because Matt Lauer asked. No mention of what styles. No mention of what brands, though Greg Koch tweeted that he’d been told the dark beer was Stone Smoked Porter. Maybe they didn’t need to talk about specific brands, but to not even discuss what kinds of beers they were tasting seemed odd, especially since the whole point was supposedly to tell people how to throw “a beer party.” They never adressed how or why any of the food paired with the beer, apart from an offhand remark Martha made that the parsnip chips paired with the dark beer’s “smokey flavors.” In the end, it was really all about the food, and really very little, if anything, was communicated about the beer. Which, if you think about it, is pretty pathetic if, as they’re claiming, “a beer tasting party is like the new thing.” Like, for sure. And I guess it must be; after all I saw Martha Stewart say so on national TV.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Hard Liver Barleywine Fest Winners 2012

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brouwers
Here are the results from the 2012 Hard Liver Barleywine Fest in held at Brouwer’s Cafe in Seattle, Washington:

Congratulations to all the winners. (And special thanks to Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef, for sending me the results since I couldn’t be there this year.)

Next Session To Consider What Makes Local Beer Better?

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I’m a little behind the eight-ball in getting the word out, but our 61st Session is coming up fast; this Friday to be exact. Our host, Matt Robinson — a.k.a. The Hoosier Beer Geek — is asking us to consider the question What Makes Local Beer Better? Here’s how he puts it:

The topic I’ve been thinking about is local beer. The term is being used by just about every craft brewer in the country. What does it really mean though? Is it more of a marketing term or is there substance behind the moniker? This month I want to think about what makes local beer better? I’m not just talking about the beer itself, although it’s the focal point, but what makes local beer better? My connection to local beer is far from thinking that my beer is actually “local.” Maybe you don’t agree with me, and you can write about that. Bonus points for writing about your favorite local beer and the settings around it being local to you.

buy-fresh-buy-local

So get yourself home to your local community by this Friday — March 2, 2012 — and put on your local thinking cap. Then start waxing philosophical on what exactly that means. Local food — and beer — mother fucker!

local-food-motherfucker

It’s Official: February Declared California Beer Month

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california
It’s been rumored for weeks, maybe longer, but I got the word a few days ago that the California Senate would vote this morning between 9 and 10 o’clock on SCR 66, introduced by Senate majority leader Ellen Corbett, a resolution to declare February California Beer Month. Rick Sellers, who writes at Pacific Brew News and lives in Sacramento, was on hand and a few minutes ago tweeted that the senate passed the resolution 36-0!

Here’s the text of the resolution:

SCR 66, as introduced, Corbett. California Craft Brewery Month. This measure would proclaim the month of February 2012 as California Craft Brewery Month.

WHEREAS, California is the birthplace of the craft brewing movement, when Fritz Maytag acquired the Anchor Brewing Company in 1965 and began brewing authentic, handcrafted beers;
and

WHEREAS, California is the home of the first microbrewery, beginning with Jack McAuliffe who built a small brewery in Sonoma from scratch, and began selling New Albion ales in 1977;
and

WHEREAS, The second largest craft brewer in the country, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, was founded in Chico, California, in 1979, and spurred the craft brewery movement around the country; and

WHEREAS, In 1977, Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 3610 to amend the state’s tied-house laws to remove the restriction on on-premises sales of craft beer. Following this change in law, California became home to three of the first five brewpubs in America; and

WHEREAS, The second brewpub in America was opened by the Mendocino Brewery in Hopland, California; the third brewpub, opened in September 1984, was Buffalo Bill’s in Hayward, California; and the fifth, opened by John Martin in March 1986, was Triple Rock Brewery in Berkeley, California; and

WHEREAS, The California craft brewery industry has an annual impact of $500 million on the state’s economy in direct wages and benefits; and

WHEREAS, The California craft brewery industry creates more than 17,000 jobs, which in turn creates billions of dollars in positive economic impact; and

WHEREAS, The California craft brewery industry creates more revenue for the state and federal governments than many other industries, generating more than $36 million in taxes in 2010; and

WHEREAS, California now has more breweries than any other state in the country, including over 280 small, independently owned craft breweries; and

WHEREAS, California is now known and recognized internationally for the quality of its craft breweries. Year after year, Californian breweries win more medals at the World Beer Cup, the largest international beer competition in the world, and the Great American Beer Festival, the largest beer competition in the United States, than breweries found in other states; and

WHEREAS, Brewery tourism is increasingly popular and contributes to the economic impact of the state’s tourism industry; and

WHEREAS, The California craft brewery industry is a leader in the stewardship of natural resources and the environment, and has made a major commitment to implement sustainable practices that are environmentally sound, including some of the largest solar arrays in the private sector, and the use of fuel cells and other innovative conservation techniques and processes; and

WHEREAS, Despite the challenges of intense global competition, the state’s craft brewery industry is strong and growing, and is a major contributor to the economic vitality of California; now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate of the State of California, the Assembly thereof concurring, That the Legislature hereby proclaims the month of February 2012 as California Craft Brewery Month; and be it further Resolved, That the Secretary of the Senate transmit copies of this resolution to the author for appropriate distribution.

And not a moment too soon, only 23 days into the month. Now that’s political efficiency. I’ll post more details as they become available. At least this year there’s an extra day in the month to celebrate. Happy California Beer Month everybody.