Continuing my Philadelphia theme for Philly Beer Week, Wednesday’s ad is for Schmidt’s. Again, I’m not sure, but my guess is it’s from sometime in the 1970s. I’m not sure about those lines and arrows at all, or what the slogan “For That Friendlier Feeling” has to do with the man opening the bottle.
Continuing my Philadelphia theme for Philly Beer Week, Tuesday’s ad is for Schmidt’s. I’m not sure, but my guess is it’s from the mid-1960s. I love how the foam is spilling out from everywhere, both mugs and the can, too.
I arrived in Philadelphia on the train yesterday afternoon not sure what to expect. My first event wasn’t until Tuesday so I had a wide open evening. So I called a few people, including the wonderful Jennie Hatton — my agent — and also with the P.R. firm for Philly Beer Week. She was two blocks away at Misconduct with Eric Wallace from Left Hand Brewing and encouraged — no insisted — I join her there. It’s been my personal experience that nobody ever says no to Jennie Hatton, so there I went. Eric handed me his terrific barley wine and the evening began, not with a whimper but a bang. The bang, it turned out, was the now legendary “Hammer of Glory,” which Jennie had just retrieved from McGillin’s. I was even honored to carry the Hammer a time or two, which being an organizer of SF Beer Week, almost felt a little subversive. But as a Pennsylvania native and big supporter of PA beer, it also felt right at home in my hands.
Me holding the legendary Hammer of Glory.
From there, we went to Local 44, scene of the scandalous PLCB raid by state troopers a few months back, where the fame of the Hammer of Glory spread and they were pouring more Lost Abbey beers than I’d ever seen in one place before.
Local 44 owner Brendan Hartranft, the Hammer and Jennie.
After a quick stop at the City Tap House, we crawled over to Standard Tap, where their Bear Ninja Cowboy contest was about to get under way. In case you’re confused, essentially it’s beerchambeau: Bear beats Ninja, Ninja beats Cowboy and Cowboy beats Bear.
Bear Ninja Cowboys, refs the Hammer and Jennie.
Knowing (and apparently sharing) my love for all things fried and potato, Jennie took me to the North Bowl Lounge & Lanes, just a short walk from the Standard Tap for some tater tots. This very cool bowling alley also has an amazing menu of tater tot dishes, on the order of Totcho’s but with a dizzying variety of choices. We went with the Wakin’N Bacon, tots with cheddar, bacon and a hard fried egg. I also ordered a special hot dog that was also cheese, bacon and a fried egg. Holy moley, they were good, some of the best tots I’ve ever had.
Tots, a dog, some eggs, bacon, cheese and Jennie.
The last stop of the night was Doobie’s, a wonderfully unpretentious neighborhood bar. It was great quiet spot to end such a great night. Plus, there was a number of people there I’d hadn’t seen in a while. They were also pouring some of the last of the elusive Standard Porter, a collaboration beer for Philly Beer Week.
Standard Tap owner William Reed, Doobie’s owner Patty with the Hammer, Suzy Woods and Brian O’Reilly, both from Sly Fox Brewing.
Below is a slideshow of my Hammer Time evening. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.
All this week I’ll be featuring ads from Philadelphia breweries since I’ll be there most of the week for Philly Beer Week. Monday’s ad is for Ortlieb. The ad is from 1959 and shows a couple loading beer onto their boat, with this deliciously goofy tagline. “It’s the he-man brew — that the gals love too!” The logo at the bottom also includes this curious slogan, “Ortlieb’s, the wet beer.” Hilarious.
This event just looks awesome. After whetting my appetite at the Monk’s Cafe’s lambic dinner Tuesday night, Shelton Brothers is putting on The Great Lambic Summit at the University of Pennsylvania the following evening, Wednesday June 9, beginning at 7:00 p.m.
Here’s a description of the event:
The Lambic World is more divided, politically charged, and fraught with danger than the Middle East. So it’s a really big deal when you get Armand Debelder (3 Fonteinen) Frank Boon (Brouwerij Boon), and Jean Van Roy (Brasserie Cantillon) together at the same table. In fact, it’s never been done before.
On Wednesday evening, June 9th, as part of Philly Beer Week, these three greats — indisputably the three most traditional and authentic producers of real lambic in Belgium — will be gathered first to celebrate and praise each others’ work. Liberal quantities of special beers from each producer will be passed around, including some rare items being flown over to the U.S. for the very first time for the occasion. There will be some artistically prepared foods, naturally, including cheeses made with Gueuze from 3 Fonteinen and Cantillon. But there will also very likely be some fireworks. Even at the top, not everyone sees eye to eye, to say the least. And there will probably some discussion, and some dirt dished, about what’s going on in the darker corners of Lambic World. Dan Shelton, beer importer, lambic fan, and well-known pain-in-the-ass, will be hosting the discussion and doing his ugly best to make sure that the evening is not without controversy, just the way you like it!
It all happens under the wise and watchful eye of the Sphinx, in the Lower Egyptian Room in the depths of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Art. The ancient inhabitants of the Nile River Valley were of course the first great civilization to make an art and religion of brewing beer — relying on unseen and then unknown wild yeasts to ferment their brew, just as the famous brewers and blenders of lambic beer in Belgium’s Senne River valley do today.
You really can’t afford to miss once in a lifetime chance to drink some extremely rare lambic beers with the people who have dedicated theirs lives to the art.
Here’s the lineup:
Frank Boon, Brouwerij Boon
Armand Debelder, 3 Fonteinen
Jean Van Roy, Brasserie Cantillon
The world’s best lambic beer, and good food, served.
Tickets are $50 person, cheap at twice the price. See you there!
Our 41st Session will be hosted by the Wallace Brothers, Jeff and Tom, from Lugwrench Brewing. They’ve chosen “Craft Beers Inspired by Homebrewing” as their topic, which Jeff describes like so:
Session topics typically come from the host’s area of passion – something they have a strong affinity towards. For Tom and I, the real pathway in our appreciation of Craft Beer has been through the hobby of homebrewing. Not only has this hobby fostered yet another reason for two geographically-separated brothers to collaborate (the core concept for the Lug Wrench blog being “a fraternal bond over beer”), it was through homebrewing where we learned what makes a marginal beer and what makes an exceptional beer. It was the lauching pad for how we came to admire (and sometimes fanaticize) about “good” beer. So during our discussions of potential topics, the debate kept coming back to homebrewing and how craft beer is connected to the amateur brewing community.
The chosen topic: Craft Beers Inspired By Homebrewing. How has homebrewing had an affect on the commercial beer we have all come to love? Feel free to take the topic in any direction your imagination leads you.
Write about a beer that has its roots in homebrewing. Write about a commercial beer that originated from a homebrew.
Write about a professional brewer you admire who got their start in homebrewing before they went pro. Write about a professional brewer who still homebrews in their free time.
Write about a Pro-Am beer tasted either at a festival or a brewpub. Write about an Amateur / Professional Co-op you’ve had the pleasure of experiencing (such as The Green Dragon Project).
Write about commercial brewers using “Homebrewing” as part of the marketing. Write about the Sam Adams LongShot beers, whether good or bad.
So brew up your own post, at home, for the next Session, on Friday, July 2.
I found today’s work of art wandering around the National Gallery of Art in D.C. this afternoon, taking a day to recover from SAVOR before heading to Philly Beer Week. The second artwork that I featured in this series was by the same artist, Jasper Johns, a sculpture of two Ballantine Ale cans bronzed over, called Painted Bronze. This work, entitled Field Painting, was completed about four years after Painted Bronze, in 1964.
It may be difficult to see, but the work includes many elements Johns used in his art, including a can of Ballantine Ale. You can see it more clearly in the detail below.
Here’s what the National Gallery has to say about Field Painting.
Field Painting, for example, pivots references both to art-making and Johns’ own career. The primary colors red, yellow, and blue are spelled out in letters hinged perpendicularly to the canvas, where they also appear in stencil-like doubles. Attached to them are various studio tools. The Savarin coffee tin and Ballantine beer can both allude to Johns’ studio paraphernalia and to his appropriation of them as motifs in his work. Passages of smeared and dripped paint, a footprint, light switch, and a neon “R” collude with other visual codes to multiply the possibility of associations.
Actually, the best way to see this painting is from an angle, on the side, where its three dimensions are more obvious.
To learn more about Jasper Johns, Wikipedia has a good overview of Jasper johns, as does Answers.com. Also, the overview at Area of Design includes a few of his representative works throughout his career.
Our 21st Guinness poster by John Gilroy features a man trimming a hedge of a seal balancing a pint of Guinness on his nose, like had been featured in earlier Guinness adverts. But he’s paying such close attention to watching the pint, that’s he’s not watching what he’s doing with the clippers and is cutting a hole into the seal back. The slogan for this one is “Lovely day for a Guinness.”
Dogfish Head Craft Brewery today announced the release of Bitches Brew to commemorate the original release of the milestone jazz album, Bitches Brew, by jazz legend Miles Davis.
The new beer by Dogfish Head is described as “a bold, dark beer that’s a fusion of three threads imperial stout and one thread honey beer with gesho root, a gustatory analog to Miles’ masterpiece.” It also features the “the album’s iconic artwork, created by the late Mati Klarwein, on its label, Dogfish Head’s Bitches Brew will be unveiled at Savor, An American Craft Beer & Food Experience tonight at the National Building Museum, Washington DC. The beer will be bottled in 750ml bottles and released through Dogfish’s distribution network in late August.
From the press release:
The newly created ale is designed, according to Dogfish founder and president Sam Calagione, “as the ultimate partner for chili or spicy curry chicken” and best enjoyed “sipped cool, not cold, from a snifter or red wine glass while listening to the Bitches Brew album.”
Calagione was drawn to the alchemical spirits in Bitches Brew right out of college, acquiring a copy of the album “within months of the first time I brewed a batch of homebrew in my apartment in New York City. I listened to it when I was writing my Dogfish business plan. I wanted Dogfish Head to be a maniacally inventive and creative brewery, analog beer for the digital age. You could say that my dream was to have Dogfish Head, in some small way, stand for the same thing in the beer world that Bitches Brew stands for in the jazz world. You can imagine how excited we are to be doing this project 17 years after I wrote that business plan.”
“There’s a spirit of innovation, of creativity and individuality, that’s at the core of Miles’ music,” said Adam Block, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Legacy Recordings. “Sam and Dogfish Head approach their art from the same place and consequently the marriage is an easy and cool one.”
Later this year, on August 31, an anniversary edition of the recording — two, actually: a Legacy Edition and a deluxe Collector’s Edition — will be released on CD.
Our 40th Session is, ironically, about Sessions themselves. Not drinking sessions per se, but Session beers, perhaps the best choice for drinking during a drinking session. Our host, Erik Lars Myers from Top Fermented has chosen a topic near and dear to Lew Bryson’s heart — as well as many other beer lovers — session beers, which he describes as follows.
There are a thousand ways to approach this.
What is your definition of a session beer? Is it, as Dr. Lewis suggested at the Craft Brewers Conference this year, “a pint of British wallop” or is your idea of a session beer a crisp Eastern European lager, a light smoky porter, a dry witbier, or even a dry Flemish sour?
Is it merely enough for a beer to be low alcohol to be considered a session beer, or is there some other ineffable quality that a beer must hold in order to merit the term? And if so, what is that quality? Is it “drinkability”? Or something else?
What about the place of session beer in the craft beer industry? Does session beer risk being washed away in the deluge of extreme beers, special releases, and country-wide collaborations? Or is it the future of the industry, the inevitable palate-saving backlash against a shelf full of Imperial Imperials?
What are some of your favorite session beers? When and where do you drink them? If you’d like, drink one and review it.
I tend to think of Session beers loosely as any beer under 5% a.b.v. and which can withstand an evening of leisurely paced drinking without reducing one to belligerence, sloppiness or incoherence. In other words, it’s a beer that allows you to stay lucid and keep up your end of the conversation throughout a drinking session, however long (within reason, of course) as the evening waxes and wanes or the discussion meanders. That’s it for my definition.
Lew Bryson at his wonderful Session Beer Project adds that it must also be flavorful, balanced and priced reasonably. And while I agree that to be a “good” session beer those qualities are desirable, I must respectfully disagree with my learned colleague that it ought to be a requirement. Just as there are bad Imperial Stouts and good Imperial Stouts, I believe there can be bad session beers, too, but either can still be considered a session beer. An expensive low-alcohol beer that’s unbalanced and not too flavorful, to my mind, is still a session beer. It’s just not one I’d drink.
But perhaps that’s just me. What I’m actually more interested in thinking about is the sessions themselves. There just aren’t enough of them. I’m in the middle of reading Kingsley Amis’ book Everyday Drinking. Actually it’s a collection of three short books by Amis that he wrote throughout his career: On Drink (1973), Every Day Drinking (1983), and How’s Your Glass? (1984). In the first, written in the early 1970s, Amis complains mightily about the demise of pub atmosphere brought upon by loud music, among other things. I can’t say why the switch began then in the UK, but for our purposes I’ll take his word for it. What struck about this is that the main reason he disliked this so intensely was not because of the music itself, but its volume. It killed conversation. It killed drinking sessions because people had to shout to be heard and often just gave up trying. He speculates that this may be because when people couldn’t talk, they drank more, which if your livelihood depends on people drinking more then that indeed might provide sufficient incentive for publicans to crank up the music.
Throughout this and the second book, it’s clear to me that Amis valued entertaining and the sharing of ideas, conversation, friendship, etc. that went along with an evening of drinking and eating above all else. His entire philosophy seemed aimed at creating the perfect party atmosphere in which all those things might flourish. In essence, he wanted to dissect and identify the elements to do just that.
And while I have had my share of uplifting drinking sessions in a pub or bar, the noise factor can make them less enjoyable or impossible altogether. Sometimes that’s okay, other times it feels like a missed opportunity. I love music wholeheartedly. I’m a former musician. One of my favorite quotes, by Friedrich Nietzsche, is “without music, life would be a mistake.” But there are times when a little quiet can go a long way, too. Whether turning it down or eliminating it completely, sometimes it’s just more enjoyable to hear your own voice and those of your friends without straining to hear them over the din.
Not all the time, of course. Sometimes listening to a great band is also the stuff of a wonderful evening. But whether there are quiet conversation rooms — the aural equivalent of smoking or non-smoking; “would you like the high-decibel section or would you prefer to be seated in the low-decibel area?” — or even certain designated quiet evenings at a bar, it might go a long way to bring back the fading art of conversation. I’d certainly be more inclined to go to a more quiet bar if my aim was to meet friends and enjoy one another’s company, not just drink in the same vicinity, as sometimes happens when a room is too loud.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, or maybe it’s because I just prefer talking too much, but I’d certainly like to see more opportunities to drink and talk, which to me is what a session is all about. If we don’t have the session to go with the session beers, than for me the session beer loses some of its purpose, its raison d’être.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and my modest plan to change this situation, at least for myself, started two months ago when I finally launched my own regular drinking sessions. I founded what I’m calling the Philopotes Society, and we’re having “meetings” the last Tuesday of every month. A “meeting” consists of an evening of friends getting together at my house, drinking some beer (usually about 30 bottles), eating some food (usually bread, cheese, chocolate and charcuterie) and talking about life, the universe and everything, but especially the beer. We’ve met twice so far and I think it’s been a resounding success. It also helps me clean out my refrigerators and try new samples that are sent to me during the prior month.
Tasting in a group has always been preferable to me than sampling alone for work. I have about 40-odd people — I’m fortunate to have friends who are brewers, chefs, writers, suppliers, retailers, homebrewers and curmudgeons like myself — and if 8-10 show up each month, we have the makings of a pretty cool evening. So far that’s the way it’s working.
The word philopotes is a great word I learned reading Iain Gaitley’s fabulous book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol. Essentially it means “lover of drinking sessions.” And I chose the holy grail as our symbol (actually it’s the grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but never mind) because, like the grail, it’s not about actually finding the cup. What’s most important is the search for it. It’s the journey that really matters. The quest for the perfect beer. To me, that’s high adventure. That’s a session. For that, we need more session beers.
Who knows, perhaps one day they’ll be Philopotes Society chapters all over the world. For now, I’m content to have a drinking session I can count on where I know I can enjoy my own session beers. And Lew, you’re welcome anytime.