Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Beer Memorial For Bill Brand March 1

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An impromptu memorial event has been scheduled to honor and remember Bay Area beer writer Bill Brand, who passed away on February 20, after being hit by a Muni Train the evening of February 8. Though there will be a family event and undoubtedly other events from the other areas of Bill’s rich life, this one is intended to be for the beer community to celebrate Bill’s contributions and impact on the Bay Area beer family. It will take place at The Trappist, where owners Chuck and Aaron have graciously agreed to host it at their establishment. The event will begin at 1:00 p.m. this Sunday, March 1, which is an hour before The Trappist’s regular opening time. The Trappist is located at 460 8th Street in Oakland, near the 12th Street BART station.

Some details are still being worked out, but the format will likely be to provide an opportunity for everyone in the beer community who knew Bill and was effected by his tireless efforts to share their memories of Bill and hoist a pint or two to his memory. I believe Chuck and Aaron are trying to get a keg of Anchor Porter, Bill’s favorite beer for Sunday. I’ve been asked to MC and start the ball rolling and then we’ll open it up to people to take turns sharing their memories and stories of Bill with the assembled party. Think of your favorite story of Bill you’d like to share for a few minutes. Over the course of the day, I suspect an amazing portrait of Bill will emerge as more and more of us pay our respects to his memory. Please join us if you’re able.

Special thanks to Gail Ann Williams and Steve Shapiro from Beer by BART and also Mike Condie for putting this all together; and, of course to Chuck and Aaron for allowing us to use The Trappist.

Dueling laptops; Bill and me at Magnolia on February 6 for the tapping of Napa Smith Original Albion Ale by Don Barkley. Photo by Shaun O’Sullivan.

Bill toasting with a pitcher of Oakland’s Linden Street beer. Photo by RRifkin.

 

Beer In Art #16: Egyptian Woman With Lotus

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The last few works have been fairly recent and modern, so today’s work goes back pretty far into history, to the 17th Egyptian Dynasty, the New Kingdom period of time, around 1539-1425 BCE. It’s in the Brooklyn Museum, an excellent museum that I visited the last time I was in New York. The Brooklyn Museum is one of the largest Museums in the United States and is the second largest in New York State. Today’s piece is part of their world renowned Egyptian collection, considered by experts to be one of the finest in the world. The work, a stone table really, is known as Woman With Offerings, and is described as a “Fragment of a Tomb Painting with Seated Woman Holding a Lotus.” It was found in a tomb in Thebes, Egypt in an area known as the Valley of the Kings.

Click here to hear the Brooklyn Museum’s docent discuss the artwork.
 

The Brooklyn Museum’s website for this work also has the following about this tomb painting.

This fragment of wall painting from a tomb depicts a woman sitting on a green mat, inhaling the fragrance of a blue lotus. Sealed jars of beer and wine rest under a table loaded with other offerings of white and yellow loaves of bread and a dark red calf’s head. A grid of red lines that guided the draftsman in positioning the objects and proportioning the figures shows through where the paint has worn thin.

What’s important for our purposes, is the three jars below the table which more than likely contained beer, a veritable necessity when packing for the afterlife. To me, what this — and the countless others that are similar — point out is that while the Ninkasi tablet may be the most well-known, the ancient world is littered with references to beer and drinking. It was obviously a very ordinary part of daily life for ancient man, given its ubiquity in what they left behind. See, for example, an Egyptian Memorial Stone of a Syrian Soldier Drinking Beer, this one dating from the 18th Egyptian Dynasty; or this painted relief from ancient Memphis, from the 5th Dynasty, the Funerary mastaba of Ti that shows jars of beer.

For more about brewing in ancient Egypt, see Ancient Egyptian Beer, Ancient Egypt Beer Making, and Beer in Antiquity.

 

Beer Can House Makes The List

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I’m having trouble concentrating on work again today, which is bad because I have three articles due. In passing the time unproductively, I happened upon a list of 100 of the World’s Strangest Buildings, displayed in two parts of 50 each. The Beer Can House, in Houston, Texas, made number 23 on the second list, making it the 73rd strangest building.

I visited the house after CBC in 2007 and took a bunch of photos. The house was the hobby of its owner, John Milkovisch, who began working on it in 1968 and kept adding to it for the next eighteen years, using an estimated 50,000 beer cans. Today it is owned by a local arts foundation, The Orange House Center For Visionary Art. They recently renovated it, inside and out, and now it’s open to the public. I visited it before the renovations were complete, so my photos look a little different than the one at the bottom, which is presumably more recent. They even have a new website up, which is new since my visit, too.

But the other strange houses that made the list are cool, too, in fact many are pretty amazing, especially if you’re a fan of architecture. If you love cool and/or unusual buildings, check them out. The beer can house is in Part 2, but Part 1 has some awesome architecture, too. The crooked house in Poland was their choice for number one. Worth a look, in my opinion.

The beer can house at night, presumably after renovation. Photo by J. Smallwood.

 

Liquid Sky

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I spent part of today just staring at the blue sky today, unusual this week, and pondering life and death and what’s it all mean? And by shear coincidence, I later happened upon a very cool series of photographs of the sky with objects held up in front of the sky to comic effect. The series is called SkyPlay and many are cooler than the two below, but these were the ones that were at least beer-related. Good for a chuckle, which I needed. Enjoy.

 

 

 

Dammit. Bill Brand Passes Away In The Night

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According to Bottoms Up, Bill Brand passed away during the night, surrounded by friends and family. The Oakland Tribune has an obituary with a guest book for people to sign. According to a family friend, “a memorial service is planned and details will be announced later today.” This is a dark day for the beer community. Let’s give whatever love and support to his family that we can.

 

Guess The Beer: Silly But Fun

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Loving bad puns as I do, I found that this silly animated gif has some groan-inducing bad puns. And the one universal thing about bad puns, especially the really bad ones, is they cry out to be shared. If I groan, so too shall you. Enjoy.

 

Bill Brand Day 12: Still No Change

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Assuming Sunday February 8 as Day One, the day Bill Brand was hit by a Muni Train, then today is Day 12 and there’s still been no change in Bill’s condition. The latest updates from Bill’s wife, Daryl, are from this morning where she writes that she is, understandably, feeling “horribly sad, [because] Bill continues to show no signs of improvement.” And also this morning on Bill’s Facebook page, the “family reports he shows no improvement and that’s not good. We are still waiting for that miracle.”

I don’t presume to speak for the entire Bay Area beer community, but I’ve talked to a staggering number of people over the past dozen days about Bill and to me there appears to be a general feeling of helplessness that there isn’t anything more we can do, no way we can truly help. All we can really do is wait and hope and pray for good news. We can — and should — keep Bill in our thoughts and hearts and continue toasting him each night around seven. Given the nature of his injuries, it may be days, weeks or even longer before his condition improves significantly. This is a vigil, and I, for one, am prepared to wait, and watch, and hope, no matter how long it takes.

 

Thank God You’re A Man

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Goldstar Beer, an Israeli brand made by Tempo Beer, the country’s largest brewer, recently had some funny ads that played on stereotypical perceptions of differences between men and women. The campaign was called Thank God You’re A Man and featured flowcharts. Two of the flowchart ads were on a great advertising website I check out from time to time, Ads of the World. Click on the images to see them in their original size.

 

Thank God You’re A Man #1

 

Thank God You’re A Man #2

 

Beer Is Good For You

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My friend Glenn Payne, who was in last week from England for SF Beer Week, sent in this story from the UK’s Independent entitled When “Bad” Food Turns Good. The story is about a number of foods that used to be thought of as being bad for you, such as red meat, oily food, cheese, potatoes, eggs, coffee and chocolate, that are now being reevaluated based on recent research that has found them not only not as bad as previously thought, but more importantly with some specific health benefits. In addition to the foods listed, the article also includes beer among them, and author Roger Dobson has this to say about it:

Despite its reputation, evidence is showing that beer can have health benefits. Moderate amounts have been linked to a protective effect in cancer, heart disease and osteoporosis, as well as increasing good cholesterol, boosting immune defences, and preventing blood-clotting. German researchers in Heidelberg say a key factor is that beer is high in antioxidants; about 80 per cent of its antioxidants are from barley and 20 per cent from hops, and they work individually and together against cancer to stop it developing and growing. Evidence has accumulated in the past decade pointing to the cancer-preventing potential of beer constituents, including the flavonoids xanthohumol and isoxanthohumol. The Council of Scientific Research in Madrid found that the level of a number of immune system cells increases significantly after 30 days, particularly in women. Researchers at Tufts University in the US say that silicate found in beer seems to reduce bone loss.

Nothing new, but always good to see the benefits in print while the New Drys continue to fulminate with uninformed intolerance that alcohol has no positive aspects.