Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Gushing Over the Pour

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I’ve long admired Eric Asimov’s column or blog at the New York Times entitled “The Pour.” Asimov is one of those rare wine writers who not only enjoys good beer but also understands it. He occasionally writes about it, too, and when he does so it compares favorably to the best beer writing. So while I often bristle at wine and food writers tackling a subject they know precious little about, Asimov is the exception to the rule. His column today, Beers Worth Waiting For, is another stellar example and as a study in contrasts neatly demolishes the debacle at the Wall Street Journal from last Friday.

Asimov, while waiting in a very long line in the hot sun for the outdoor salmon bake at this year’s International Pinot Noir Celebration with two French winemakers, was not having any fun. The winemakers fortuitously suggested a beer run. After enjoying several craft brews, their waiting was made considerably more congenial, sparking Asimov to ruminate about beer and wine. His sentiments filled me with admiration, and a lot of head nodding.

In the course of a day it seems that many winery workers drink a good bit more beer than wine. The two beverages in fact co-exist quite well, and therefore it irritates me when wine and beer are pitted against each other, especially when wine-lovers demean beer. Beer-lovers have a bit of catching up to do in terms of achieving status and understanding, so I have a little more tolerance for them when they feel compelled to demonstrate how well good beers can go with certain foods, usually at the expense of wine.

My friend Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery, has engaged in more than a few competitive wine-and-beer tastings, because he has a point to prove. Yet he has the excellent sense to be an unapologetic wine-lover as well as a beer-lover. Rigidity and self-deprivation rarely win people over, but open minds go a long way to opening other people’s minds.

Amen, brother. If only more wine writers and wine lovers shared his views, what a better world this would be for both grain and grapes.
 

Sparkling Hop Liqueur?

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Kirin Brewery announced today that they will releasing their third quasi-beer into the populy Japanese alcohol category known as “third-category.” The Japanese media came up with that name, officially they’re classified as “other miscellaneous alcohol” or “liquor.” Naturally they’re subject to lower taxes, are often made with soybeans but without malt. The first and second categories are “beer” and “happoshu,” which is a low-malt beer with less than 67% malt.

Kirin’s newest entry into the lucrative Japanese quasi-beer market is “Sparkling Hop,” which, according to the press release, will “feature a distinctive aroma created by blending Japanese and New Zealand hop varieties. Strong pressure gives the product a rich head and a refreshing finish, Kirin officials said.”

Sparkling Hop’s target demographic is twenty-somethings, the same group that are buying the dreaded alcopops.

Also from the press release:

Sparkling Hop is made by mixing a “happoshu” low-malt drink with spirits. Under Japan’s liquor tax system, the new product is classified as a liqueur, whose tax rate is lower than those for beer and happoshu.

This is Kirin’s third product in the third category, following “Ryoshitsu Sozai” and “Nodogoshi Nama.” With the three products, Kirin hopes to beat out its rivals in the heavily crowded third-category market.

These “third-category” products along with the low-malt happoshu will likely never reach our shores, because they’re largely a result of taxation. If Japan’s tax structure was different, they wouldn’t exist. But they appear to be having the same damaging effect as alcopops are having here, not so much in terms of underage drinking (in Japan it’s age 20), but insofar as the sweeter drinks are finding favor with kids raised on sweet soft drinks who are not acquiring a taste for bitter drinks like beer as they age. It’s somewhat ironic that Japan’s beer industry in trying to get around the tax laws, may be shooting themselves in the foot with these lower-taxed, highly sweetened alcoholic drinks.

 

The Bronze Age of Irish Brewing

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With at least 4,500 small breweries dotting the Irish landscape, you might be tempted to call this the Golden Age of Irish Brewing, but all this brewing was taking place around 2500 BCE, in the Bronze Age. At least that’s a new theory being proposed by the Moore Group, whose ideas will be published next month in Archaeology Ireland.

Apparently there are these odd features of the Irish countryside called “Fulacht Fiadhs” that include a mound of stones and troughs dug in the ground in the shape of a horseshoe. They are usually lined with either wood or stone. Alongside the trough is a hearth used to heat stones. There something like 4,500 throughout Ireland. Their exact purpose is largely a mystery, although there are many theories. “It is postulated that these pits were filled with water and heated stones thrown in to create a pool of boiling water in which meat was cooked.” This is the leading theory, but as has been pointed out, the sites are generally not littered with the bones of animals or other food-related items, which you would expect to find if they were places of cooking.

Other suggested uses include for bathing, the washing and dyeing of cloth, metalworking, tanning and leather working. In any event, the sites are almost always found near of source of water. The way it was believed to be used was that the trough would be filled with water and then heated stones dropped in to quickly bring the water to a boil.

Billy Quinn and Declan Moore, two archaeologists from Galway, puzzled over this enigma until, nursing a hangover one morning, pondered “the natural predisposition of all men to seek means to alter [their] minds” and wondered if perhaps the Fulacht Fiadhs might have served a very different function. After doing some intensive research around the world on the habits of Neolithic man, have concluded that the Fulacht Fiadh’s primary use may have been for brewing, though they believe it may also have had other secondary uses and functioned much like the kitchen sink.

To prove their theory, the pair had to recreate the process that early Irish people would have used to brew their beer. So they set up an experiment using as close to the original method as they could to try and brew some Bronze Age beer. Here is a summary of that experiment.

The experiment was carried at Billy’s home in Cordarragh, Headford, Co. Galway. Seeking authenticity in replicating our Bronze Age ale we decided that our equipment should be as basic as possible. The wooden trough, posthumously donated by Billy’s granduncle, was 60 years old, leaky, wedge-shaped and measured 1.7 m in length, 0.7 m in width with a depth of 0.65 m (roughly consistent with the average trough dimensions from excavated examples). When filled with water to a depth of 0.55 m, it held 350 litres. After digging a pit, the trough was lowered into the ground and water added. Despite some initial leakage we eventually reached an equilibrium in the water level by simply flooding the immediate area. For the purposes of our experiment we sourced granite and sandstone from Connemara.

The stones were heated in a fire for roughly two hours. Step one involved transferring the heated stones into the trough using a shovel. After 15 minutes we achieved our optimum temperature of 60-70c. At this point we half submerged a wicker basket in the trough and began to add our barley in small amounts to prevent the mash from congealing. Over a period of 45 minutes, maintaining a fairly constant temperature with the addition of occasional heated stones (some of which were recovered from the trough and reheated) our water transformed into a sweet, syrupy, workable wort.

After converting the starches to sugar, ascertained by tasting the mash, we brought the mixture to a boil to sterilise it and simply baled the final product into fermentation vessels. We used spigoted plastic containers with a total capacity of 75 litres. Including the leftover liquid we could easily have produced up to 300 litres of wort. At this point we added flavourings, the majority of which were growing around us in Billy’s garden. These additives were ground in a mortar, wrapped in muslin and suspended in the top of our wort. We added 150 ml of brewer’s yeast after cooling the vessels in a bath of cold water for 3 hours.

We produced what is more properly termed a gruit ale (gruit is a term used to describe the herbal mix used to flavour ale). Through our experiments, we discovered that the process of brewing ale in a fulacht using hot rock technology is a simple process. To produce the ale took only a few hours, followed by a three-day wait to allow for fermentation. Three hundred litres of water was transformed into a very palatable 110 litres of ale with minimal work.

At the end of the process they were pleased with the results. “It tasted really good,” Quinn said. “We were very surprised. Even a professional brewer we had working with us compared it favorably to his own.” The beer itself is said to be a “cloudy, yellowish brew with no discernible head with a yeasty taste reminiscent of weiss beer.”

Here’s the basic recipe for Bronze Age beer:

  1. Hot stones rolled through grain to malt it.
  2. Grinding of malted grain.
  3. Rocks heated on fire.
  4. Heated rocks transferred into water in a fulacht fiadh trough.
  5. Malted grain in wicker baskets plunged into water heated to 67° C (153° F).
  6. Mixture stirred to break down starch into sugars that will react with yeast to form alcohol.
  7. Mixture spiked with local ingredients such as bog myrtle, the hop-like bog plant, heather, elderflower, juniper berries and honey.
  8. Mixture baled into fermentation vessels, which are cooled in running water before yeast is added.
  9. Leave for three or four days to ferment.
  10. Drink.

The Moore Group has an extensive photo gallery of the experiment and has posted a video on YouTube of the experiment:

Fascinating stuff. I’d love to try some of that.

 

Putting On Airs

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A friend sent me this link (thanks Steve) to a Wall Street Journal article entitled When Beer Takes On Vintners’ Airs, about craft brewers making beer with more complex flavors. There’s a lot of good in the article, but I can’t help but feel like it’s dripping with a certain condescension. I don’t know if it’s intentional or simple ignorance. Of the last 43 articles by author Conor Dougherty, only two were about beer, with the vast majority of his writing being about economics. And in one of the two he likens cask ale to flat beer, a fundamental mistake and in that article his writing barely conceals a disdain similar to the current piece. In the article published on Friday, he starts out with a particularly fallacious statement.

Small brewers have long boasted that their beer can stand up to the finest wine. Their new strategy: Make beer that tastes like wine.

No brewer I know sets out to make his beer taste like wine. That’s never been the goal, nor is it the result. The brewers mentioned in the article merely are trying to stretch the boundaries of beer and make unique and original works of liquid art for their customers. Just because they may have some flavors that wine also has doesn’t mean the brewers who made them set out to make a wine. Taste any of them side by side with a wine. If you can’t tell the difference, stick to water. They’ll never be mistaken for wine.

Though many winos may be loathe to admit it, brewing is a far more complicated and involved process, requiring far more equipment, ingredients and education or experience than does making wine. Winemakers — at least all the ones I know — will freely admit this. A winemaker from Mondavi that I sat with at a dinner there told me she thought winemaking was easy compared to brewing, that all she did was get the grapes ready and let nature do its thing. Brewers, on the other hand, have figurative knobs and buttons to fiddle with in endless combinations. In the same way a mere twelve notes account for all the world’s music, four main ingredients account for a diversity in beer that is truly staggering. While a sad majority believe, as Dougherty puts it, that beer is “plain and even watery,” they couldn’t be more mistaken. The major beer companies have been passing off an industrial product as beer for so long now — and with so much marketing muscle behind it — that a majority of Americans today believe that’s what beer is. Simply put, they’re wrong. Or more kindly, that it’s not all that beer is or can be.

People might refer to Wonder Bread as bread but does anybody think it’s the only kind of bread? Who doesn’t know there are many kinds of bread or that there are lots of better breads? I’m sure Wonder Bread and all of the other nutritionally challenged white breads far outsell gourmet artisanal bread but it seems to me most people at least recognize that there is a difference. Yet time and time again, people seem to think that all beer is the same and often seem quite surprised to discover that there are literally dozens of distinctive styles of beer. That’s a triumph of marketing that’s perpetuated by a media that insists on remaining as ignorant as the public at large. Even when some do appear to at least realize there is beer beyond the industrial lagers, they are often dismissive and condescending which only serves to maintain the status quo opinion.

But back to the Journal. Just because brewers use grapes as an adjunct or age the beer in oak wine barrels doesn’t make it wine or even a wine beer. Winemakers don’t own grapes. Not everything made with grapes is wine. Are cork dorks up in arms over grapes in jams and jellies trying to make winey jam? And like jams, brewers also use many other fruits in beer, too, there’s nothing sinister about a few using grapes.

But Dougherty concludes that “the concept with all of these” beers it to add “extra layers of complexity” and refers to them all with a broad brush, branding them all “winey beers,” which I find more than a little derogatory. Every time he finds any similarity between one of these boutique beers and his beloved wine — such as serving temperature, bottle size, or the fact that it uses a cork — he takes it as a sign of beer trying to copy wine or be like wine. It’s as if he believes that these features are somehow the exclusive domain of wine, and none dare do the same lest they be accused of envy or stealing. It’s a very weird position to take. Beer has used corks for over a century, it’s nothing new. Many Belgian beers have been using corks since the 19th century right up to the present. 750 ml bottles likewise are nothing new for beer outside our shores. And as for being consumed at warmer temperatures, that’s also been the case for centuries. It only seems strange to Americans since the major companies so vigorously promote the notion of ice cold beer. The colder the beer, the less of the flavors that will come through. It’s not magic. If you make a beer that actually has good rich, complex flavors you’ll want to taste those, won’t you? And so you drink them at a slightly warmer temperature. So what?

The article also calls these so-called “winey beers” hybrids just because they “have a stronger aroma, fruitier tastes — and alcohol levels that, at 10% to 15%, are two to three times that of a typical beer.” Huh? IPAs have strong aromas, plenty of mild beers have fruity esters and barleywines, bocks and Belgian tripels are plenty strong. That makes them hybrids … why? Dougherty also calls them a detour, because for craft brewers they’re a relatively recent phenomenon. As the craft beer segment matures, why wouldn’t you expect brewers to make increasingly sophisticated products? Why is that a detour, and not simply the vanguard brewers leading the way?

Apparently cheese and food pairings and the ability of some beers to be aged is also infringing on wine’s cache, because Dougherty seems surprised that pairing might even be suggested. Cheese and beer have long been a far better pairing than wine. It’s only that the wine industry has done a great job of inextricably linking the two that most people don’t realize it. But the monks at Chimay, to give one example, have been making cheese as long as they’ve been making their fine beer. Together, as you might expect, they’re a heavenly delight. Beer dinners, of course, are becoming more common every day and there’s nothing noteworthy about strong beers ability to be aged.

The article finishes up with a tasting, naturally not by experts, but by journalists who are fans of either beer or wine. It’s the rare wine tasting that includes amateurs, but that seems de rigueur for media beer tastings. Just bring in a few shlubs off the street and see what they think. It’s just beer, after all. Who needs people who know what they’re tasting? That seems especially egregious given this whole piece is talking about beers who by definition are not the usual “plain and even watery” beers. So perhaps that’s why they chose journalists instead of just the man on the street. Either way, it’s infuriating. What did they learn? Nothing, apparently. Here’s the write-up:

On a recent afternoon, we gathered a panel of reporters and editors made up of both beer and wine fans to sample winey beers from around the country. Our first discovery: These beers aren’t for everyone. Comments ranged from “interesting” to “terrible.” A number of our testers said most of the brews tasted like neither beer nor wine but made them pine for one or the other. “Is it possible that there is beer and wine and the two should never meet?” asked one befuddled sampler.

Wow, they “discovered” that something you taste isn’t universally beloved? Tell me, please, what is “for everyone?” Wine? Nope. Whisky? Nope. Coffee? Nope. Water? Probably, but that’s got to be the only liquid I can think of that truly is for everyone. Saying some people found them “interesting” and some “terrible” without any context like who they are,what their predispositions are, or their backgrounds makes these cryptic one-word comments completely meaningless. Of course they didn’t taste like wine, they’re not wines no matter how many times you insist on calling them “winey beers.” That some people didn’t think they tasted like beers merely displays how little the tasters know about beer and its diversity. Beer doesn’t have just one taste or flavor. It doesn’t all taste the same. And more importantly, each bottle they tasted (although to be fair I don’t even know what beers they tasted because that isn’t revealed) is a unique beer and isn’t meant to taste like anything else. Why did the tasters expect that it would taste like either beer or wine?

But my favorite line is that last sentence of the paragraph, “‘[i]s it possible that there is beer and wine and the two should never meet?’ asked one befuddled sampler.” Befuddled is the word for it, alright. Dictionary.com’s second definition for “befuddled” is “to make stupidly drunk.” The first involves confusion, which is what this particular taster and perhaps the entire article seems to be. Beer and wine have not “met” in any of these beers. They are strictly beers. They are complex beers with full, rich flavors which some people cannot help comparing to wines just because they happen to also have some of the same flavors. Dark beers often have coffee notes from the roasted malt, too, but nobody complains about brewers making beer that tastes like coffee. No matter how “winey” the beers are, or how much whining the author insists upon, they are not beers that taste like wine, nor are they meant to be. Please, for the love of everything holy, stop calling them “winey beers.”

Over a lifetime of tasting beer, I’ve used terms also used by wine tasters in describing beers like the ones mentioned in the article, as well as many others, without once thinking they were beers trying to emulate wine. To my way of thinking, any phrase that someone reading a description would understand and recognize is useful in communicating the elusive and largely personal sensation of taste. It’s hard enough to train one’s palate to discern minute flavor compounds, aromas and defects, let alone be able to write them down so that others can readily understand what you’re talking about and get a sense of what the beer they’re reading about might taste like. So any descriptor that conveys something recognizable is worth using if it furthers that goal, even if it’s commonly used to describe a wine. I know there any many people who believe that beer should never be described using anything but very basic language, usually because such advocates believe beer itself too basic to be discussed in loftier terms. That’s a mistake and merely serves to perpetuate the myth that all beer tastes the same and will not yield subtle nuances of flavor. I also think there’s a backwards prejudice that thinks discussing beer as the complex beverage that it is will necessarily make it take on the snobbish airs that many ascribe to wine aficionados. But the beers mentioned in this Wall Street Journal article are already as complex as wine, and so to not describe them in similarly complex terms is to not do them justice. That’s a very different thing from presuming because they’re complex they must be trying to be like wine. How insulting it is to presume complexity equals wine and as ales and lagers they couldn’t possibly stand on their own as fine beers. But my point is that we should be able to describe any of these beers using allusions to wine and winelike flavors without the presumption that they either are wines or beer trying to be like wines. They’re beers simply trying to be as flavorful and unique as they possibly can. If the wine community can’t understand what to me seems so self-evident, perhaps they’re not as sophisticated as their reputation suggests. It can’t be bottle envy, can it?

From time to time, I am accused — even by colleagues — of going too far and overreacting to articles like this one, usually because they claim some attention paid to beer is better than no attention, or it’s not all bad or because they sense no malicious intent. All of those arguments may be true, but I still think at least part of the reason beer is so often lambasted by the media is that no one calls them on their mistakes or their unflatteringly offensive portrayals. Appeasement is almost always a bad way to go. Nobody’s going to change people’s attitudes if everyone remains passive and quiet.

So yes, maybe this latest Wall Street Journal article helps spread the word about craft beers that are every bit as good as fine wine. But I don’t think it’s asking too much that they do so without insulting beer in the process. Maybe hiring someone to write about beer who actually likes the stuff, has an open mind or knows something about it would be a good start.

In the end, I find it strange that the author’s title suggests that wine has airs that brewers are attempting to copy or emulate. To put on airs is “to assume an affected or haughty manner.” I am certainly willing to agree that there are segments of the wine industry that reflect such pretentiousness, but don’t understand why the wine community would be so willing to paint themselves so unflatteringly and then suggest that beer, by making complex, flavorful beers that rival wine, they, too, are putting on similar airs. Why can’t we just talk about the new, complex beers and leave wine out of it altogether.

 

Drinking Slows Dementia

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There was an item in the “Raw Data” section of my newly arrived September issue of Playboy magazine (yes, I read the articles, too) about the moderate drinking of alcohol helping to stave off or slow the onset of dementia. Here it is in its entirety:

For people suffering from cognitive decline, having up to one drink a day over a three-year period may slow the development of full-blown dementia by 85%.

A drink a day, eh? Well, I’m certainly willing to give it a go in my golden years. How did I miss this one?

A quick search reveals that there was an item at Future Pundit a few years back about women and a daily drink and Science Daily had a similar article in January of 2005. But those were strictly talking about women, whereas the Playboy assertion appears more gender neutral. Clearly more digging is necessary. Here’s what I found.

As early as 2001, Healthnotes Newswire mentioned a study published in Stroke, a medical journal, that reached the same conclusion. A page at Alcohol Problems and Solutions also appears to make the same claim, based on a study published in Aging Health, which said:

There is some evidence to suggest that light-to-moderate alcohol consumption (up to three alcoholic drinks a day, or between one and seven drinks a week) may reduce the risk of cognitive impairment in the elderly compared with those who abstain. Drinking in moderation may contribute to some brain atrophy, but it may also reduce the number of silent infarcts in the brain, a known risk factor for cognitive impairment. In addition, light drinking may reduce blood clotting and blood serum lipid levels, as well as stimulate acetylcholine production in the brain

In addition, two later separate studies seem to confirm those findings. The first was published in Neuroepidemiology in October 2006. The second, in the journal Neurology seems to reach much the same conclusion, as reported by Daily News Central in May of this year.

I didn’t find the 85% figure that was in Playboy, or the study it was based on, but there does seem to be a lot of support for the general idea that moderate drinking can delay my going balmy when I’m a senior citizen. Could this mean that in my old age, there may be fewer lucid neo-prohibitionists to annoy me? Now that would a silver lining … a silver bullet lining.

 

Northern England’s 1st Female Brewer

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The term “brewster,” which means female brewer has fallen largely out of fashion, though I know a number of brewsters who do actually like the word. I’ve always liked the sound of it, myself, and it evokes a time when it was not only common for brewers to be female, but it was it was the norm as recently as the 1700s and into the early 1800s. Women brewed beer for the household, which is where the term “alewife” comes from. At one point, something like 80% of brewers were female.

The beautiful wooden fermenters at Wentworth Brewery.

 But then “monasteries began larger scale brewing for passing travelers, so women became less involved in brewing.” Later, in the mid-1800s, the industrial revolution took brewing from the home to the factory brewery and men became the dominant force in the industry. With rise of small craft breweries in the U.S. and abroad, women have been returning to brewing in greater numbers, especially in America.

From some reason, this is less so in England, where the promotion of Michelle Bright to head brewer at the Wentworth Brewery in South Yorkshire makes her only the second brewster in all of England, and the first in northern England. At just 26-years old, she’s also the youngest.

The only other brewster in the UK is Sara Barton, who owns and brews at Brewster’s Brewery in Grantham, Lincolnshire.

 

Both breweries are effectively with microbreweries, with small output over a local geographic area. A website for the village of Wentworth has a nice photo tour of the Wentworth Brewery online. And Brewster’s website features a short history of brewsters.

From the press release:

Michelle is also thought to be the only award winning brewster in the land, after winning the Gold Medal accolade at the Oakwood Beer Festival in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. She is an ex-army chef who has served in Kosovo and has since turned her skilful hand to brewing.

Steve Beech, Wentworth Brewery’s managing director, said: “Michelle has been with Wentworth for a few years now and has well and truly served her apprenticeship. She is a model employee and we are delighted that she has risen through the ranks to the dizzy heights of head brewer. She really deserves it and we are looking forward to tasting further exciting, new and interesting brews from Michelle in the future.”

Wentworth’s popular Oatmeal Stout – brewed by Michelle – scooped the best in show prize last year; at 4.8% it is dark, smooth, deeply delicious and definitely ‘moreish’! The outstanding Oatmeal Stout has already won many awards across the country and must be tasted to be fully understood. The satisfyingly malty flavour is achieved partly from the roasted barley and Golding hops.

Plus they’ve got some of the most beautiful labels I’ve seen. Here are just a few of them, but check out their website to see many, many more cool labels.

    

    

 

Steve Harrison’s Body Found

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The body of Sierra Nevada Brewing Vice-President Steve Harrison was found earlier today, around 4:15 p.m., in the Sacramento River, by a local resident who has helping been with the search on his Wave Runner since last week. Roughly two hours later, the local sheriff’s deputies recovered Harrison’s body, which had been caught on a snag in spot in the river known as the washout near Scotty’s Boat Landing, about half a mile from where his blue Toyota Prius had been discovered next to the river. Harrison had been missing since last Tuesday, August 7. The body has been turned over to the Butte County Coroner’s Office for an autopsy.

My heart goes out to his wife, Linda, and the rest of Steve’s family, not to mention all the close friends and colleagues at the brewery that he’d been working with since it began in 1979. The brewing community has lost one of its most influential and important members. This is very sad day for all of us.
 

MADD Hopping Mad Over Movement to Lower Drinking Age

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On the heels of a growing debate and movement to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18, MADD has issued an “Action Alert” to its members and affiliate neo-prohibitionist groups asking them to let their friends, family and legislators know the “facts.” Though in reality what they’re hoping to do is reinvigorate the moral zealots and remind legislators that common sense and following the will of the people are anathema to staying in office. Politicians don’t like to be portrayed as being for underage drinking, but that’s exactly what would happen to anyone with the temerity to express an opinion other than their own.

They must be feeling the heat from people speaking out against the current drinking age, because their rhetoric seems more vicious than usual. And their press releases use the word “fact” an awful lot despite not really offering anything new or anything that is actually a fact. To my way of thinking, if you can reasonably debate something claimed to be a fact, then it’s not really a fact in the first place. Here are the three points on which they hang their latest argument:

  1. Almost 50 high-quality studies have found conclusively that the 21 minimum drinking age decreases alcohol-related fatalities by 16 percent
  2. The brain continues to grow into the early/mid-20s and that drinking before this can damage the brain irreversibly
  3. In most countries with lower drinking ages, intoxication is much more common among young people than in the United States

So let’s look at these so-called “facts.”

1. There’s nothing conclusive about these studies and many experts believe that alcohol-related fatalities were already in decline before the drinking-age was effectively raised in 1984. Then there’s how you define “alcohol-related fatalities,” which in many cases includes passengers who’d been drinking or even victims. So that means that if a sober person accidentally ran over someone who’d been drinking, it was counted as an alcohol-related fatality. That hardly sounds like a high-quality study to me. Most, if not all, of these studies suffer from the same sorts of problems. They’re hardly ironclad facts that everyone agrees upon.

2. This is a beautiful one. Fear is always a great tool of propagandists. Apparently all of the people of the rest of the world have damaged brains, as does everyone of my generation who drank before reaching the age of 21. Except that virtually every other country’s kids beat the pants off of us at math, science and other academic measurements. Imagine how smart the rest of the world would be if only they didn’t allow their kids to drink. I guess they’d all be super-geniuses. If this was really the danger they make it out to be, no country on Earth would allow drinking before the brain fully formed. I’m going to assume this is only a problem if someone drinks to great excess and that would more properly be curbed by making it legal earlier and teaching responsibility and moderation both through parental modeling and learning in the home.

3. This claim is mostly based on a European study that appeared to show higher “intoxication rates” but the study itself, in it’s conclusion, said only that “the pattern of alcohol consumption reveals that frequent drinking is most prevalent among students in the western parts of Europe, such as the British Isles, the Netherlands, Belgium but also in Austria, the Czech Republic and Malta. Very few students in the northern parts of Europe drink that often (my emphasis).” “Frequent drinking” and “intoxication” are two very different things. The definitions are not necessarily comparable and, as such, these are hardly facts.

One interesting side note is that the only example given by MADD (on their new propaganda website Why 21) — which they also call the best example — is to “look at what happened in New Zealand.” They continue:

“In 1999, New Zealand lowered its purchase age from 20 to 18. Not only did drunk driving crashes increase, but youth started to drink earlier, binge drinking escalated, and in the 12 months following the decrease in legal drinking age, there was a 50 percent increase in intoxicated 18- and 19-year-old patients at the Auckland Hospital emergency room. Clearly, Europe has serious issues with youth alcohol use.”

Hmm, how to put this delicately? Apparently being a teetotaler makes you unable to know anything about geography. Last time I checked, New Zealand wasn’t anywhere near Europe, not even in the same hemisphere. Talk about keeping your facts straight, they don’t even know what countries are in Europe. Is it possible many neo-prohibitionists are also flat-earthers and don’t believe in maps? That would certainly fit my perspective of many of them.

Another howler in the Myths & Facts at Why 21 is in their explanation about why being able to vote or die in the military are not sufficient reasons to also be allowed to drink. They note that different “rights have different ages of initiation,” such as the minimum age to get a hunting license, drivers license or even get married. They then state that “these minimum ages are set for a reason” and list the reason for the drinking age as the following:

In the case of alcohol, 21 is the minimum age because a person’s brain does not stop developing until his or her early to mid-20s. Drinking alcohol while the brain is still developing can lead to long-lasting deficits in cognitive abilities, including learning and memory.

Anybody ever heard that as the reason why the drinking age is 21? Me neither. That certainly wasn’t how they sold it in 1984. Back then it was supposedly to reduce drinking and driving. But the WMD story didn’t fly I guess so now it’s regime change in the guise of developing brain scares. Again, if this was anything other than smoke and mirrors, the rest of the world would have sat up and done something about it, too. Can you really believe that only Americans love their children enough to protect them? Who is naive enough to believe Europeans or the rest of the world wouldn’t rush to protect their own kids’ developing brains if a true threat actually existed?

Another thing that doesn’t fly is the ages for hunting licenses, driving, buying tobacco and legal consent for sex and marriage. All of those occur before one becomes a legal adult, which happens at age eighteen. So those rights are regulated to people who are not yet considered adults. It’s done by adults to protect people who it is believed need such protection. The over 18 examples they give are the ages one can be elected to Congress and minimum age requirements imposed to rent a car or hotel room. The minimums for Congress (25), the Senate (30) and President (35) were set down at a time when living to 35 made you an elder statesman. I can see no reasonable sense in which this is comparable to the drinking age. Trying to insure more experienced men and women would represent us in government bears no relationship to at what age you can drink a beer. And the minimums to rent a car or stay in a hotel are industry standards and are about liability and risk management. They have nothing whatsoever to do with rights or the law. It’s not illegal to rent a car if you’re under 25, it’s just that no major car company will take your business. It’s a decision fueled by commercial interests, not a mandatory law imposed by our government.

So as far as I can tell, all of the under-18 regulated behaviors and the over-18 ones MADD uses in their rationalization, be they constitutional or business-oriented, are in no way related to the idea of what it means to be an adult. And that, I think, is the crux of the argument. I don’t think anyone would dispute that to vote or to fight and possibly die defending our nation makes you an adult. If participating in our democracy or fighting for it doesn’t make you an adult, then I don’t know what else possibly would or, indeed, could. At 18 you can also enter into contracts, gamble, hunt, buy cigarettes, drop out of school, have sex and/or get married without your parents consent. Really, the only legal good I can think of that’s denied eighteen-year olds is alcohol. And as the rest of the world does not deny its adults in this way, one can only conclude that fanaticism and moral zealots have gotten their way. That a few souls have decided it’s time to show the MADD Emperor’s nakedness, I can only say “what took you so long.”

 

Kirin Discovers Anti-Oxidizing Yeast

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Kirin Brewery, along with the Keio University Institute of Advanced Biosciences have announced the discovery of new yeast strain found by analyzing the metabolic byproducts that brewer’s yeast synthesizes. What they found was that brewer’s yeast creates large quantities of “hydrogen sulfide when processing a tiny number of metabolites of the amino acid asparagine.” The team then selected yeasts that unusually prolific asparagine metabolites. The new strain “processes large amounts of sulfurous acid — an antioxidant that helps keep beer fresh — without synthesizing hydrogen sulfide, which has an unpleasant sulfur smell.” In fact, the new Kirin yeast makes 50% more sulfurous acid but no hydrogen sulfide whatsoever. Kirin plans to start using the new yeast in the beer shortly, presumably after more testing is completed. But if true, it could revolutionize the brewing industry.