Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Anchor’s Annual Christmas Party ’09

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The lovely missus and I attended the annual Christmas party at Anchor Brewery, one of our favorite events of the year, and one of the few my wife regularly attends. Good friends, good food and great beer. I always start with a Liberty Ale — a perennial favorite — and also finally had a chance to try their new Humming Ale. The Humming Ale is brewed with an “unusual hop variety called Nelson Sauvin” and was brewed to commemorate the 30th anniversary at the brewery’s present location on Mariposa Street in San Francisco.

Me and the Missus at Anchor
Me and Mrs. Brookston Beer Bulletin all dressed up and somewhere to go.

Though there was some terrific food this year, as always, I can never get enough Maytag Blue Cheese. There was also a tasty brisket with sage mashed potatoes, and a veggie table that included some wonderful au gratin potatoes. But my favorite was Pumpkin Soup Shooters with toasted mini-turkey and cranberry Panini.

This year's Xmas Box Tree
The annual tree made from Christmas Ale mother cartons and decorated with bottles and bows.

The dessert was Spiced Gingerbread with dried fruit compote and Anchor Porter ice cream. The ice cream was so good I had seconds of just that, which I found paired really well with the Christmas Ale.

Below is a slideshow of this year’s Anchor Christmas Party. 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.

Two Companies, 265 Brands

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abib millercoors
Anat Baron, who created the film Beer Wars, according to a recent post, “has received hundreds of emails and tweets since the film came out asking for a list of the beer brands owned by the 2 big brewers.” In Who Owns What?, she posted a first draft using IRI Data for the 4 week period ending 11/1/09. I spent the evening hastily putting together a second draft, which undoubtedly is still not complete, but I think moves the ball forward. My list of The Big Brewer’s Brands is on a separate page. Please let me know who’s missing or what I got wrong, as I didn’t spend as much time on it as I might have liked.

Tactical Penguin Goes Nuclear

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Unless you’ve been ducking and covering under a rock, you no doubt saw that, while we were sitting down to eat turkey on Thursday, Scotland’s BrewDog released Tactical Nuclear Penguin, which they’re touting as the new champion “world’s strongest beer.” Weighing in at a robust 32% a.b.v., it bested the current American contender, Samuel Adams Utopias, by a whopping 5%. As is typical of the self-styled punks of beer, the release was amid controversy. Predictably, anti-alcohol groups in the UK wasted no time denouncing the beer’s strength as irresponsible, a laughable claim given Scotland’s whisky industry. Jack Law, head of Scotland’s own Alcohol Focus Scotland, said “it is child-like attention-seeking by a company that should be more responsible. The fact that they have achieved a new world record is not admirable. It is a product with a lot of alcohol in it – that’s all. To dress it up as anything else is cynical. It’s as strong as whisky, so you have to ask whether this is actually a beer or a spirit – it’s clearly a spirit.” So obviously the Scots have no shortage of ignorant blowhards in their neo-prohibitionist organizations, too. The fact that there are only 500 bottles and each one sells for £30 (almost $50) and is only a 330 ml (roughly 11.2 oz.) would suggest this is not cause for widespread panic, as it’s hardly going to be selling out of the local Tesco anytime soon.

Perhaps more surprising, one of BrewDog’s bitterest critics of late has been Roger Protz, the grand old man of CAMRA and British beer writing generally. I usually have great respect for Roger and all he’s done for beer, but he seems to have lost his mooring on this one and drifted out into the waters off insaneland. In today’s BrewDog Go Bonkers , he calls the BrewDog lads all sorts of unflattering names and accuses them of all manner of impropriety, even incorrectly accusing the new beer of not actually being a beer — it clearly is — and gets the barest details of its manufacture wrong, despite the fact that BrewDog’s website includes a video explaining how they created Tactical Nuclear Penguin.

He even throws his hat into the ring with the likes of Jack Law, head of Alcohol Focus Scotland, which I find almost unforgivable, especially given Law’s churlish quote about BrewDog’s “childlike attention-seeking.” Um, gentlemen, what exactly do you think marketing is? The very point is to get attention. You can disagree with the way a company goes about the marketing of their products, but calling it “childlike” or suggesting that it’s seeking attention is like saying the goal of advertising is to sell things. Duh. Paging Captain Obvious.

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James Watt in his penguin suit, with his newest beer.

Just two weeks earlier, in Enough Is Enough, Protz was again telling BrewDog’s James Watt and Martin Dickie it was time they “grew up and stopped behaving like a couple of precocious teenagers standing on a street corner with back-to-front baseball caps screaming for attention.” Wow. Watts referred to Protz, when he retweeted this, as “Grandpa Protz” and I think he may be onto it. I can’t imagine telling a brewer to grow up in print. That takes more cheek than I possess. They’re all adults, conducting their business the way they want to. But apparently taking their cue more from American sensationalist brewers than the often stodgy traditions of UK beer really ruffled Protz’s feathers. I know Roger to have strong opinions and to be a great champion of English brewing traditions, but these two anti-BrewDog posts seem more like personal attacks, as if they’ve offended him directly. As much as I hate to say it, he comes across as out of touch, a sentiment apparently shared by a great number of people who left comments to his posts. There were an enormous number pointing out the flaws in his reasoning and calling him on being set in his ways and unable to appreciate anything outside classic English beer’s range. Read the comments, they’re as illuminating as Protz himself, and are in many cases highly entertaining on their own.

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James Watt out of his penguin suit, with bottles of Tactical Nuclear Penguin.

From the press release:

This beer is about pushing the boundaries, it is about taking innovation in beer to a whole new level. It is about achieving something which has never before been done and putting Scotland firmly on the map for progressive, craft beers.

This beer is bold, irreverent and uncompromising. A beer with a soul and a purpose. A statement of intent. A modern day rebellion for the craft beer proletariat in our struggle to over throw the faceless bourgeoisie oppression of corporate, soulless beer.’

The Antarctic name inducing schizophrenia of this uber-imperial stout originates from the amount of time it spent exposed to extreme cold. This beer began life as a 10% imperial stout 18 months ago. The beer was aged for 8 months in an Isle of Arran whisky cask and 8 months in an Islay cask making it our first double cask aged beer. After an intense 16 month, the final stages took a ground breaking approach by storing the beer at -20 degrees for three weeks to get it to 32%.

For the big chill the beer was put into containers and transported to the cold store of a local ice cream factory where it endured 21 days at penguin temperatures. Alcohol freezes at a lower temperature than water. As the beer got colder BrewDog Chief Engineer, Steven Sutherland decanted the beer periodically, only ice was left in the container, creating more intensity of flavours and a stronger concentration of alcohol for the next phase of freezing. The process was repeated until it reached 32%.

Pete Brown, by contrast, has a far more measured reaction to BrewDog’s new beer. We agreed on what was the best part of the press release.

Beer has a terrible reputation in Britain, it’s ignorant to assume that a beer can’t be enjoyed responsibly like a nice dram or a glass of fine wine. A beer like Tactical Nuclear Penguin should be enjoyed in spirit sized measures. It pairs fantastically with vanilla bean white chocolate it really brings out the complexity of the beer and complements the powerful, smoky and cocoa flavours.

Pete takes the right approach IMHO, wanting to focus on the beer itself, which he describes as “an Imperial Stout that has been matured in wooden casks for eighteen months. It has then been frozen to minus twenty degrees at the local ice cream factory in Fraserburgh. By freezing the beer to concentrate it this way, they get the alcoholic strength.” Hard to say what it might taste like, but Pete speculates it will have “very rich, smooth, mellow and complex flavour.” Also, like him, I’m certainly keen to find out. I recently attended a Utopias beer dinner, my third tasting of this year’s version, which is 27%, tantalizingly close to Penguin’s 32%. It’s a wonderful beer, but its release was not accompanied by the frenzy of this beer. Likewise, other very strong beers like Schorschbräu (at 31%), Hair of the Dog Dave (at 29%), as far as I know, did not cause any beer writers to scold them for their efforts. So what’s the difference?

As to the question of whether or not it’s beer, Pete continues:

I once attended a breakfast hosted by Jim Koch, founder of Samuel Adams, father of the awesome Utopias. I asked him a similar question — is this still beer? — and was inspired by his answer. He said something along the lines of beer has been around for thousands of years. Over that time it has evolved continually, and the pace of evolution has picked up considerably in the last couple of centuries. “How arrogant would we have to be to say that in this time, our time, we’ve done everything with beer that can be done? That we’ve perfected beer?” he asked me.

This is why when I love Brew Dog, I really do love them. It’s easy — and not always inaccurate — to accuse them of arrogance. But not when they do something like this. It’s far more arrogant to say ‘we can’t possibly improve on our beer’ than it is to never stop trying to do precisely that. In my marketing role, I often hear brewers talk about something like a slightly different bottle size and refer to it as ‘innovation’. Brew Dog are genuine innovators on a global stage, redefining what beer can actually be.

I guess I just don’t understand the bombastic reaction the release of this beer produced and the way in which it and the brewer’s intentions have been misinterpreted. Why wouldn’t any beer lover want to try it? After all, it really should be about the beer.

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Charting Beer With Infographics

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My friend and colleague Rick Lyke has the good fortune to have a son-in-law who’s a graphic designer and really, really good at creating graphs or infographics, which is essentially a chart that tell a story. For the second year in a row, Rick has persuaded his son-in-law, Mike Wirth, to create an awesome infographic of various GABF medal statistics for his Lyke2Drink blog. Since he introduced this back in August, about a month before this year’s GABF, hopefully he won’t mind my sharing it. I’ve parsed some of the most interesting mini-charts within the infographic and displayed them below.

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These charts show the number of breweries by state and the total number by type or size of brewery.

breweries-vs-medals
This is a chart of states with the most per capita breweries vs. the states that have won the most cumulative medals since they began awarding medals through 2008.

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This is a chart of the breweries that have won the most cumulative medals since they began awarding medals through 2008.

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This is a chart of the individual beers that have won the most cumulative medals since they began awarding medals through 2008.

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Lastly, here is a detail of the west coast and the medals won by breweries in California, Oregon and Washington.

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This is the entire infographic, show smaller of course, but click here to see it full size or see it at Mike Wirth’s website or with Rick Lyke’s original analysis.

Inventing Binge Drinking

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I’ve long railed against the various governmental health department definitions of “binge drinking” as being out of touch with reality and self-serving to anti-alcohol groups. In the U.S., the CDC defines binge drinking as “five drinks in a row” and in the UK it’s too many “units of alcohol” in a given day (or number of hours). But that wasn’t always how it was defined.

In a recent issue of the Social History of Medicine, an Oxford Journal, social scientists Virginia Berridge, Rachel Herring and Betsy Thom published Binge Drinking: A Confused Concept and its Contemporary History.

Here’s the summary of the article:

Binge drinking is a matter of current social, political and media concern. It has a longterm, but also a recent, history. This paper discusses the contemporary history of the concept of binge drinking. In recent years there have been significant changes in how binge drinking is defined and conceptualised. Going on a ‘binge’ used to mean an extended period (days) of heavy drinking, while now it generally refers to a single drinking session leading to intoxication. We argue that the definitional change is related to the shifts in the focus of alcohol policy and alcohol science, in particular in the last two decades, and also in the role of the dominant interest groups.

To me, one of the key points of this article is how the definition has changed to create a panic of increasing binge drinkers when it’s far more likely rates are roughly the same, only the definition has changed so that it not only seems like the problem has grown worse, but so that anti-alcohol advocates have a convenient new method by which they can base ever more draconian policy demands.

Binge drinking as a concept has a distant history: but it also has a recent one. The term has come in recent years to describe two quite distinct phenomena. First, it is used to describe a pattern of drinking that occurs over an extended period (usually several days) set aside for the purpose. This is the ‘classic’ definition, linked to clinical definitions of the disease of alcoholism, as in Jellinek’s 1960 classification. Secondly, binge drinking has come to be used to describe a single drinking session leading to intoxication, often measured as the consumption of more than a specific number of drinks on one occasion, often by young people. There is no consensus on how many drinks constitutes this version of binge drinking—how much alcohol—and a variety of ‘cut-offs’ are used.

The second meaning has become prominent in recent years, is used extensively in research and informs UK policy. The ‘new’ definition has largely, but by no means entirely replaced the ‘classic’ definition, and both terms co-exist, if somewhat uneasily at times, in the alcohol field. Thus, it was evident from our research that there has been a shift in recent history in the meaning of the term. What was less clear was how the current confused definition of binge drinking has come to hold sway in public and policy discussions when it seems to be different from definitions which operated in the past. This is an issue which has implications for policy. But it is also a change which throws light on the relationship between science and policy. Our overall hypothesis, which is set out in this discussion paper, is that the definitional change must be related to the shifts in the focus of alcohol policy and alcohol science, in particular in the last two decades, and also to the role of the dominant interest groups in the alcohol field. It is not a change simply in the types of people drinking and the ways in which they drink, but rather an issue of perception which tells us something about the ways in which science and policy interact. [My emphasis.]

And the perception, as well as the target, has indeed changed. While binge drinkers used to be thought of as solitary older males, today the binge drinking “focus is on women and young people.” Although they’re careful in the wording of the article, I think it’s clear they’re saying that the shift in defining binging has been a bad idea, as it’s taken the focus away from the people who really need help and placed it on a more convenient target that allows neo-prohibitionist groups to sound the alarm about the problems of underage drinking — the children, always the children. People naturally want to protect kids from harm, and so it’s much easier to advance destructive alcohol policy under the rubric of underage drinking issues. I’d argue that this is even likely the reason for the shift in the definition, to advance the anti-alcohol agenda more effectively. Fear is always more effective than truth, sadly, in motivating people.

Among the journal article’s conclusions:

Policy makers should be aware of the context in which they operate. Concepts do not appear out of thin air, but have their own history. This study can in fact be seen as feeding in ‘evidence’ to policy on the rational model. On a more theoretical level, this change of definitions over time is also a case study of evidence and policy itself. It tells us how science interacts with policy making and the policy environment.

Exactly. In this case, the science was manipulated and created to further a specific anti-alcohol agenda over the last two decades. As a result, everyone I know is a binge drinker. That’s what happens when science no longer reflects reality but instead is used to remake it.

The American Beer Question

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The American beer question, simply put — what is an “American Beer” — has been much debated in recent years, especially in the wake of InBev’s purchase of Anheuser-Busch last year. In The Daily Campus, a Connecticut student newspaper, author Tom Godwin wonders aloud in his essay The American Beer.

What exactly is an American beer? I’ve been asking myself that question a lot the last few days. Is it simply a beer that was first made in America, or is it a beer that is better when made here than anywhere else? What about an old style with a new American twist; does that make it American or simply an imitation?

It’s a question that hasn’t yet been answered with complete satisfaction, and he definitely adds some interesting thoughts to the debate. Most of all, I like that as a young man, he’s proud and supportive of American innovation. He opines that “American brewers are never satisfied with what they are doing, and that is the true ideal of beer in this country.” He gets it, unlike older writers who cling to tradition instead (but more about that in a post later today).

But it’s his conclusion that sticks with me.

American beer, just like its people, is an extreme melting pot of creativity, tradition, capitalism and an unnerving sense of complete disregard for reality. I don’t think I’d have it any other way.

Beer In Art #54: Vangobot’s 99 Bottles Pop Art

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art-beer
Today’s work of art may be one of the strangest pieces I’ve highlighted here, and may in fact stretch the definition of what actually constitutes “art.” The piece, or rather pieces, were designed by a human artist, but were painted by a robot, dubbed “Vangobot,” no doubt a reference to Vincent Van Gogh. The title of the work is a literal one, 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

99_bottles-Reflect
99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall — Reflect.

The Vangobot is the brainchild of the Pop Art Machine and here’s their description:

Pop Art Machine is an experimental art suite that renders complex vectors portraying many different brush sizes, paint layers and brush handling techniques. The results can be printed but also physically painted with acrylics on canvas using a specialized CNC based robot named Vangobot.

There’s even a short video of Vangobot in action, painting.

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99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall — Spring Fashion.

There are fifteen different versions of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, of which I’ve featured seven of them here. As far as I can tell, the names of each version have something to do with either their color scheme or an association made from that color.

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99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall — Trident.

At the Pop Art Machine website there are over 20,000 paintings done by Vangobot.

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99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall — Theology.

The website features Pop Art, a style that’s as much an attitude as a style. From Wikipedia:

Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist’s use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art. Pop removes the material from its context and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, for contemplation. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.

Pop art is an art movement of the twentieth century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects, pop art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. Pop art, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists’ use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.

Much of pop art is considered incongruent, as the conceptual practices that are often used make it difficult for some to readily comprehend. Pop art and minimalism are considered to be the last Modern Art movements and thus the precursors to postmodern art, or some of the earliest examples of Postmodern Art themselves.

Pop art often takes as its imagery that which is currently in use in advertising.[5] Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists. Consider the Campbell’s Soup Cans labels, by Andy Warhol. Even the labeling on the shipping carton containing retail items has been used as subject matter in pop art. Consider Warhol’s Campbell’s Tomato Juice Box 1964, (pictured below), or his Brillo Soap Box sculptures.

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99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall — Blue.

Some of the most well-known Pop Artists include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Keith Haring (who was born in Reading, PA but grew up in nearby Kutztown; I had his uncle as my art teacher in high school).

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99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall — Gone Walkabout.

All fifteen versions of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall can be downloaded in the high resolution size of 3600 × 3406 so it can be printed fairly large, perhaps large enough to fill your wall.

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99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall — Astoria.

For about Pop Art, beyond Wikipedia, there’s also some good info at the Art Archive, Art Lex, World Wide Arts Resources and Pop Art Machine has a large collection of articles about Pop Art.

Beck’s Sale Called Off

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Reuters is reporting that the impending sale of Beck’s by Anheuser-Busch InBev has been scuttled, by ABIB. According to the weekly German magazine WirtschaftsWoche, the 1.7 billion Euro ($2.54 billion) contract was ready to be sign by purchaser U.S. buyout firm Bain Capital when ABIB walked away from the deal. WirtschaftsWoche is speculating that the earlier “sale of 13 eastern European breweries for 2.2 billion euros in October eased Anheuser-Busch InBev’s debt burden enough for the brewing giant to call off the Beck’s deal.” That’s all that’s known so far, but I’m, sure we’ll learn more on Monday.

Toy Beer Trains

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Today, of course, is the busiest shopping day of the year. I’m staying home and drinking, as usual, but yesterday at my in-laws, my mother-in-law put up on the wall a giant poster where the grandkids could list all the toys they were hoping Santa might bring them this year. My son Porter filled out his entire section with requests for trains, particularly Lionel trains. He’s been obsessed with trains as long as I can remember. First it was Thomas the Tank Engine, then the I Love Toy Trains series, followed by Geo Trax. For a while now, though, he’s been fully engrossed in the expensive model trains, especially HO and G gauge, which seem to be his favorites. It what almost appears savant-like, he knows more about trains than anyone I know. To me, the old black steam trains all look alike but he sees them and cries “that’s the Big Boy” or the “GG-1” or some other unfamiliar name with complete certainty. I’d think he’s just making it up but recently at the barber shop, another man waiting his turn happened to run a local train museum and the two of them talked about trains like equals. The man confided in me later that my son had truly impressed him with his train knowledge, confirming what I’d always believed, that Porter really is as obsessed as I can be, just about different things. The apple really doesn’t fall very far from the tree.

One thing that’s surprised me is that I see toy trains with breweries on them all the time. But what I’ve learned about model trains is that despite the word “toy” often being associated with them, there are far more adults collecting them than kids. For one thing they’re very, very expensive. So I suspect that’s why they can get away with so many beer-themed boxcars and the like. When we got home last night from or holiday feast, I decided to do a quick Google search for toy trains for breweries. Lots of lots of them, big surprise. There’s even a guy out there who collects toy beer trains, and he’s cataloged 780 of them with 658 photos. Check out The H.O. Beer Car Collectors Website and be amazed.

The most I’ve ever seen in one place is in Germany, at Weyermann Specialty Malt in Bamberg.
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In Weyermann’s meeting room, the wall is completely filled with brewery signs and every available shelf, mantle and ledge has toy trains on them.

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Mostly European brands, but there are a surprising number of American brewery trains, too.

Below is a slideshow of just a sampling of all the toy beer trains I found online. Most are from the The H.O. Beer Car Collectors, which is hands down the best resource I came across. The 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.