A colleague of mine, Greg Kitsock, has been published a few times in the Washington Post lately, and that’s great news since so few beer writers break through through the wine glass ceiling of most major newspapers. Kitsock is now doing a biweekly column in the Post. And if that wasn’t terrific enough for him and the beer community at large, his column is also being syndicated, presumably by Post-affiliated papers. For example, I just stumbled on an article he did about canned beers and Oskar Blues in the Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky. The original piece ran in the Washington Post a little over a week ago. That’s great news as far as I’m concerned.
Against the Ropes
Part of me breathes a sigh of relief when someone else I respect reacts the same way I do to something, case in point being the recent Slate beer slam that I wrote about yesterday. Not only did Food & Wine editor Nick Fauchald take offense, but so did fellow beer writers Stan Hieronymous and Jess Sand. On one hand there’s a certain comfort to know I’m not off the deep end, which is a place I often find myself, but on the other hand these sort of attacks on beer seem to be coming with an alarming frequency here of late. Increasingly, they seem calculated to cause offense in order to increase web traffic, ratings, exposure, etc. It’s what I’ve called the Coulter-effect since incendiary pundit Ann Coulter is a master at the ridiculously offensive statement that’s crafted just for that purpose of keeping herself in the public eye as an object of media attention without which presumably she’d whither and die (figuratively, I mean). There have been quite a few of these lately against beer that have caused quite a stir, but I won’t mention them by name so as not to give them more of what they crave — attention.
This latest one on Slate is heating up again, thanks to a Q&A with author Field Maloney that the Washington Post hosted yesterday at 10:00 a.m. I’m sorry I missed the live version, but there is a transcript, thoughtfully sent to me by a Bulletin reader (thanks Sean). Maloney answered a baker’s dozen of questions, most of which were asking for advice on what to drink, but a few were more illuminating, both for the questions themselves and Maloney’s answers.
Question #4 was from a wine blogger in the D.C. area, Winesmith, and he displays a great deal of ignorance (I don’t mean that derisively BTW, just that he doesn’t seem to be aware) about how well food and beer work together when he writes the following in his query. “More people are beginning to realize (consciously or not) that wine and food enhance each other, but beer is a refresher that washes food down.” To his credit, Maloney disagrees with this, and says he “think[s] [beer’s] flavors can play off the flavors of food nicely.” But the wholesale statement that wine is so self-evidently better with food than beer is remarkable in what it says about perception and how the self-avowed wine lover can become myopic in pursuit of a narrow range of tastes. Wine goes quite poorly with a wide range of foods, such as Barbecue, Cajun, Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Mexican, to name a few. As Garrett Oliver put it in his wonderful book, The Brewmaster’s Table, “spices distort wine flavors, turning white wines hot and red wines bitter.” And the caramelized flavors from roasted grains work perfectly with the similar caramelized flavors you get when you cook meat. I could go on and on, but the point is simply that I’m always surprised at what people don’t know and so surmise or presume to be true based on propaganda. It’s understandable but deeply troubling.
Question #7 concerns the much-discussed 2005 Gallup poll that was the basis for some of Maloney’s conclusions. The question, from Philadelphia, was that “despite the Gallup Poll in 2005 (the 2006 poll put beer back on top, by the way, but it didn’t get anywhere near the press attention the 2005 one did — more evidence of a wine-wing media bias…) beer continues to handily outsell wine, both in volume and dollar sales. What’s that indicate?” Maloney responds with these gems.
Some of the beer people pointed this out in 2005. Even though more Americans said they preferred wine in that pool, beer still outsold wine 6 to 1. So either a very few people drink a whole lot of beer, or people are more stuck on beer than they let on. I think because wine has become more of a “lifestyle” drink, people might be more likely to say they “prefer” wine in a poll, even though they actually drink more beer. But who knows? The unpredictable psychology of polling behavior is fascinating to me.
Also, I think the American media loves stories that indicate a shift in the status quo. In this case, with wine vs. beer, it was a shift in the status quo that seemed to reinforce some larger cultural trends. That kind of stuff is catnip to journalists.
Now this is just plain odd. Maloney actually admits “beer still outsold wine 6 to 1” along with his fascination with the “unpredictable psychology of polling behavior.” He then went on to explain why so much of the media pounced on the 2005 poll. So not only did he know that the poll was bogus and not indicative of a real trend, he even speculated on why it was so over-reported. So maybe this is just too obvious a question, but then why on Earth did he use the poll as support for his theory that suddenly wine is ascendant and beer is in a nosedive. Acknowledging that here is a bit like getting away with murder and then later saying offhandedly, “oh sure, I knew I killed her, but ….” To me, this makes Maloney a first class wanker, because it means everything that flowed from this first incorrect statistic (in paragraph two of his article) that he knew was incorrect is all malarkey. It makes the whole hatchet job more malicious somehow. I could more easily forgive using a faulty statistic if I thought it was an innocent mistake or that he genuinely believed it to be true. But writing falsehoods that you know to be false to support an already questionable conclusion is really hitting below the belt.
Finally, in Question #10, a person from Cleveland asked him to justify his position given the terrific growth that craft beer has experienced lately. Maloney’s answer was the same as in the sidebar of the original piece, and points out what I suspected, which is that many people who read the article didn’t even know there was a sidebar since to view it you had to click on a link in the middle of the story. Basically, Maloney dismisses the entire craft beer industry with a wave of his hand because it doesn’t represent a big enough piece of the pie. It’s a stunning piece of logic which in my opinion requires balls the size of kegs to even say out loud. It’s just so condescendingly insulting. It reminds me of the way some people treat children, the ones that refuse to take seriously anything they say until they reach a certain age. But 100 million cases of beer seems like a plenty big enough kid. To keep the analogy going, craft beer is in its mid-twenties, and has been showing signs of maturing for several years now. Pretending we don’t exist or that we don’t matter seems necessary only because our continued existence and health makes impossible the notion that beer is dead and wine victorious. It’s irresponsible journalism, in my opinion, to so nakedly ignore facts that do not support your conclusion.
Of course, Coultering doesn’t require facts, only that you be as outrageous as possible. Here Maloney excels. As he correctly points out in the beginning of his answer to Question #2, he states “I’m not a beer authority.” He just plays one in the press. Slate should have been wary of letting someone whose only apparent beer expertise is that he drinks the stuff declare an entire industry to be in its death throes and the healthiest portion of it irrelevant. Then again, maybe Slate was in on the Coultering. “But who knows?” Like Maloney, I too am nostalgic for a pastoral bygone era, but mine is for a time when journalists and the news media had standards and ethics. Maybe such a time never really existed, who knows? But I’ve decided that I won’t let facts get in my way, either. Apparently that’s not how it’s done anymore.
Session #4: Local Brews
Today is our fourth Session a.k.a beer Blogging Friday and the theme is something of a departure from our usual topic. This month’s host is the Gastronomic Fight Club from Omaha, Nebraska, and they’ve chosen “Local Brews” as the theme, describing his goal as wanting to “create a guide book of tasting notes to drinking local.”
As I often do, I decided to tackle the theme literally, and so I went to the closest brewery, which is Moylan’s, a mere 1.7 miles from my home (2.3 if you take the freeway) in Novato, California.
We moved to the town of Novato in northern Marin in late December, just over five months ago. We sold our condo in San Rafael for a small house, but one with a yard for the kids and no more stairs (our condo was on four levels. After a while, it began to feel like we were living in an Escher drawing.) Condo life was also impersonal, and we craved more of a community and neighborhood feel to where we lived.
Novato is a relatively small (population approx. 50,000) bedroom community with a small downtown area. It was only established in 1960, making the town one-year younger than I am! We live only two blocks from the main downtown street, Grant Avenue. In the few months we’ve been here, it’s been far more enjoyable than the three years we lived in San Rafael. We can walk to a lot of places, which is great. One place that’s a little far, unfortunately, is the town’s only brewery.
Moylan’s is located on the outskirts, so to speak, a part of our only really big shopping center, Rowland Plaza, along with a Costco, Target, Staples, a multi-screen movie theatre and many other chain stores. It was built and opened in 1995 by Brendan Moylan, a Novato resident. Moylan also opened nearby Marin Brewing six years earlier, in 1989. In addition to the brewpub and full pub menu at the brewery, there is also a production facility where Moylan’s and Marin Brewing bottle several of their popular beers in 22 oz. bottles.
I had thought about going to Moylan’ for lunch, but I just couldn’t get it together and so didn’t manage to get there until around four in the afternoon. At that late hour I didn’t expect anyone to be in the brewery itself, but happily Moylan’s new head brewer Denise Jones was still there. She recently replaced James Costa who left to work at E.J. Phair. Denise has been brewing commercially for many years and is probably most well-known for her years at Third Street Aleworks in Santa Rosa. She poured us a beer and sat down with me to chat.
I told her about “The Session” and this months theme as we tried the Pomegranate Wheat, a beer that James Costa first made last year. Denise had told me she’s been increasing the amount of fruit and lowering the IBUs so I wanted to taste the difference. Indeed, it did taste more “juicy” and had a nice sweetness that wasn’t at all cloying.
Next, I tried their ESB on cask, but unfortunately it was oxidized. Denise confessed they’ve been having a problem with the line and she’s working on fixing it. In the meantime, I also tried the ESB from a regular carbonated tap and also the nitrogen line. It was interesting to have the same beer from three different delivery systems. Oxidation aside, the cask version naturally was the smoothest of the three, though the Nitrogen one was a pretty close second. No matter how many times I try it, I’m amazed every single time how much better cask beer is, especially when you can do a direct comparison. Not that Moylan’s ESB was bad, but even the oxidized cask was almost preferable to the harsh, forced CO2 of the regular version.
Denise brought up one aspect of drinking locally that had not occurred to me before. She suggested that one reason people preferred their local brew was that it was made with the same water that was already familiar to them and that familiarity made it automatically taste more unconsciously recognizable and thus was preferable on a visceral level. It reminds me of the way your Mom’s home cooking tastes better, not because it actually is better than a five-star restaurant, but because it has that familiarity, a certain nostalgia perhaps, that makes it taste better than it really ought to. Given that water, like human beings when you get right down to it, are mostly water it does make a certain kind of sense. I’m kicking myself that it hadn’t occurred to me before now. Many beers are rightly famous in part because of what the local water source added to the beer’s flavor, but that would be true of almost everything affected by the local water, from food cooked in it to the simple tap water you drink day after day.
After a pair of session beers, I decided to go out with a bang and for my final beer decided on Ryan O’Sullvan’s Imperial Stout. It’s a style I’m already fond of and I’ve had the beer before but I don’t order it on draft often enough. It’s a mighty fine beer and at 10% abv packs quite a wallop. It’s thick and viscous, something on the order 10W-30, and very full-flavored with hints of berries and roasted coffee. It’s a great sipping beer that deserves to be enjoyed slowly so it’s ever-increasing complexity come through as it warms. It was a nice beer to finish with and I sat and savored it after Denise left for her commute home to Napa.
Here’s a list of all the beers Moylan’s currently has on tap at the brewpub. The descriptions are their own. A dozen or more of their regular and seasonal beers are also available in 22 oz. bottles throughout the Bay Area and Califoria generally, as well as parts of Arizona, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington.
BEERS CURRENTLY ON TAP AT MOYLAN’S
- Unfiltered Wheat – A Light and Refreshing American Style Wheat Ale. 4.5%
- Pomegranate Wheat – Tasty Unfiltered Wheat blended with Pomegranate Juice that makes perfect Summer afternoon treat 5.0%
- Extra Special Bitter – Our Traditional English Style Bitter. This one is served on Co2 for a slightly more bitter finish. Enjoy! 5.2%
- Moylan’s Special Bitter – Our Traditional English Style Bitter served on Nitrogen for Smooth Maltiness and a Creamy Finish. 5.2%
- Tipperary Pale Ale– Our Award Winning Classic Style Pale Ale. It’s slightly hoppy with smooth, subtle malty finish. 5.0%
- India Pale Ale – This American Style IPA is Slightly Malty with an aggressive Hop flavor crisp finish, that leaves you wanting another. 6.5%
- Moylander Double IPA – This Ale has received a score of 97 points and a rating of SUPERLATIVE at the World Beer Championships in Chicago. Huge and Hoppy, Thick and Hearty . . . not faint of heart! 8.5%
- Hopsickle Triple IPA – A homage to hops with an Ale that stimulates the taste buds with the blast of Tomahawk, Cascade and Centennial hops. 9.2%
- Kilt Lifter Scotch Ale – “FIRST PLACE CALIFORNIA STATE FAIR 2005 & 2006” Our Flagship Beer! Traditional Scottish “Wee Heavy” Ale is Big, Rich, and Malty, with a Warm Finish. 8.0%
- Old Blarney Barley Wine – HUGE malt flavors with a big hop kick, this heavy ale is not for faint of heart! 10%
- Irish Dry Stout – A classic Irish style dry stout. Rich and Creamy with a roasted character finishes smooth and dry. Served on N2 4.8%
- Imperial Stout – A Monster Stout with a Warming Smooth Malty Finish and Hints of Roasted Coffee and Chocolate. 10.0%
- Cask Conditioned Ales – Irish dry stout & extra special bitter.
Beer Is Dead, Long Live Wine
vs. 
Yesterday Slate Magazine, in the guise of Field Maloney — who claims to drink beer — declared beer all but dead and wine standing over it in the boxing rink taunting it ala a triumphant Cassius Clay after he defeated Sonny Liston.
The only problem with that sentiment and, indeed, much of his article is that it simply isn’t true. He uses old and questionable statistics and ignores the entire craft beer segment of the marketplace, something like 99% of the breweries out there seem to be under his radar. That’s pretty remarkable given that he claims to like the very stuff he’s bashing. You’d think he’d know just a little bit more about it, wouldn’t you? He does briefly mention craft beer, but only to suggest that we’ve all pilfered wine’s descriptive language. Apparently wine drinkers own the term “floral.”
But every other time he uses the word beer, he’s using it in a very narrow sense. By beer, Maloney means Bud, Miller, Coors and maybe Pabst and any brands owned by the big guys. Period. Because the way he describes “beer marketers” and “American beer executives” it’s abundantly clear he’s not talking about the small fry.
While using support for his position that beer is down and out he uses the infamous 2005 Gallup poll that seemed to indicate that people were beginning to prefer wine to beer, calling the findings “astonishing.” As noted in the sidebar, however, the 2006 poll results returned beer to the top spot, which is where it had been virtually every year before 2005, too. The 2005 results were obviously anomalous but despite that it keeps showing up in print, used to push various agendas. Beer outsells wine roughly four to one, and has done so for many years. That statistic is easily verifiable, unlike what people say about what they like — their so-called preferences — and so it’s a far more accurate portrait of the alcohol landscape. And while overall consumption has been steadily decreasing for many years, and even if we allow for Maloney’s uncited figure of wines sales having doubled over the last ten years (from a small number to begin with), beer is still wildly more popular than wine and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
The sidebar continues by dismissing the 2006 poll, despite the fact that every poll prior to 2005 agrees with it, saying “[s]till, while wine consumption has grown steadily in this country, beer consumption has remained flat. (The one exception to this trend is craft beers, which have enjoyed double-digit sales growth in the last few years. But craft beers command less than 5 percent of the domestic beer market. Anheuser-Busch alone, by comparison, controls about 50 percent of it.)” What I take away from that bit of tortured analysis is that because craft beer doesn’t represent a big enough piece of the pie, then it’s not worth talking about and it’s not indicative of any trends. Yet Anheuser-Busch has test-marketed or rolled out last year alone something like fifty new products that give the appearance of being craft beers to compete with this segment of the industry. They certainly wouldn’t be spending all their resources on such folly if craft beer wasn’t having an impact on them, so Maloney’s off-hand dismissal of craft beer seems misleading and counterfactual.
I’d love to see figures on big wines vs. boutique wine sales as a percentage of the total (though I suspect definitions are every bit as difficult as in the beer world) but I suspect Maloney doesn’t discount those small wine producers in quoting wine statistics and the gains they’ve made the way he discounts craft beer. And he appears to entirely ignore box wine, jug wine and other cheap wines made in vats the size of Montana, as if all wine was hand-crafted. The notion that all wine is fine wine is every bit as specious as saying all beer is industrial.
Brewers will no doubt get a kick out of this zinger. “The hallmark of beer is consistency: A brewer strives to make batch after batch of Pilsener so it tastes the same—and often succeeds without much difficulty.” So much for the author’s earlier jab about beer being the “result of a complicated process of manufacture.” If it’s not too difficult to make beer consistently, it must not be that complicated after all. That series of statements seems more than a little insulting to me. Most, if not all, of the winemakers I have met have the utmost respect for brewers and do think it’s harder or more complicated to make great beer than great wine. A winemaker I sat next to at a dinner at Mondavi many years ago told me that she thought what they did was easy compared to making beer and that the grapes did all the real work. So yes, I think there is something to beer being more of a complicated affair than wine, but I don’t see why that makes it any less of an art than he appears to believe is the case with winemaking.
Maloney also claims that it was our society’s “shift from an agrarian society to an urban, industrial one” that made beer our drink of choice, because mass production displaced hand made drinks, such as “hard cider (the rural drink of choice), rum, and whiskey.” But didn’t many rum and American whisky brands that are still with us today also get their start during the industrial revolution? If so, then why is beer the bad guy here? Also, he states that beer started to outsell cider “around the time of the Civil War,” but I’m not sure that’s true. I remember reading that cider’s popularity throughout the country did not wane until Prohibition, and that until that time it continued to outsell beer. If that’s true — I’m trying to remember and find where I read that — then it continued to be quite popular through many decades of industrialization. And that seems to contradict his premise that mechanization caused or was responsible for beer’s popularity during the 19th century.
Interestingly, additional criticism of Maloney’s article came from an unlikely source. Nick Fauchald, Senior Associate Food Editor at Food & Wine magazine, penned a rebuttal wonderfully entitled Beer to Wine: “I’m Not Dead Yet” in which he also cites craft beer’s recent gains and suggests the following.
Slate and other outlets sounding the beer death knell are missing one very important point: It’s the generic-tasting, mass-produced beer (Budweiser, Miller and their ilk) that Americans are waving off. American craft beer is still alive and kicking, experiencing its biggest growth since the microbrewery gold rush of the 1990s.
Slate even in mentioning craft beer manages to do so each time with a dismissive tone that makes it sound irrelevant to the discussion. But that ignores over 1400 independent small to medium-sized breweries and brewpubs successfully providing craft beer locally, regionally and even nationally. Craft beer is part of the slow food movement, part of organic food lifestyles, and a part of eating and drinking locally campaigns. It’s just one of many gourmet products, like coffee, chocolate, cheese, bread and many others, that have literally changed the way we perceive and think about them. Craft beer has raised the quality and status of American beer to the point where it has the respect and envy of beer lovers around the world. It’s only here in the U.S. that it gets so little respect.
Unfortunately, a lot of that criticism comes from food and wine sources. I don’t know or understand why so many wine and food writers appear to feel threatened by beer. I don’t know if it’s simple ignorance or malicious snobbery. Is it a kind of good ole boys mentality that can’t abide beer stealing some of their thunder? That sounds almost ridiculous, except that it seems to happen time and time again. Perhaps the real question is why they feel the need to pit the two against one another in the first place? Is it really a competition? Is it really us vs. them? I certainly don’t want to believe that’s it, because I love wine, too, as do most of the hardcore beer people I know, including other writers and brewers. And all of the winemakers I know love beer. So it comes down once more to the question I’ve asked time and time again: why can’t we all just get along. Seriously, I’m not just being rhetorical, but why can’t wine and beer seem to coexist and be supportive of one another? Why do Maloney and so many others feel the need to bash beer in order to lift up their preferred libation? It’s not everybody, obviously, as Nick Fauchald from Food & Wine nicely demonstrates, but it seems to me an awful lot of people who write about wine and/or food have it in for beer. Why is that? It’s got me crying in my beer, because it just doesn’t have to be that way.
UPDATE: Jess Sand over at the wonderful Bar Stories added a very thoughtful and lengthy diatribe on the same Slate article, as did Stan Hieronymous over at Appelation Beer.
Space Beer?
On April 28, 2007, a UP Aerospace SL-2 rocket blasted off into space on a routine mission. It carried the ashes of deceased actor James Doohan, who portrayed “Scotty” on Star Trek (I actually met Doohan once in the early 1980s when I worked for a chain of videostores in North Carolina) along with Mercury 7 Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper and 200 other urns. SL-2 is short for UP Aerospace’s SpaceLoft-2 , a rocket suborbital sounding rocket. UP Aerospace sends up four to six such commercial rockets each year.
In addition to the remains sent into space, the payload consists of photographs, seeds, science experiments, soccer jerseys and the secret payload of Microgravity Enterprises, Inc.. According to their website, Microgravity Enterprises goal is to “develop space-based products and make them available to the general public at low affordable prices.” Currently, the make Space2O, bottled water enriched with electrolytes that were flown in space aboard the SL-2, and Antimatter, an energy drink in which many of the ingredients have likewise flown in space.
All that Microgravity Enterprises, which calls itself a space commercialization company, will say about the latest flight is that their payload contained the ingredients with which they’ll make the “first true space beer”. Company spokeswoman Linda Strine “says said ingredients, the amounts and types of which are secret and patented, will be delivered next week to a ‘production facility’ that in the span of a month will generate an otherworldly brew called Comet Tail Ale. “We flew enough ingredients to support almost a year’s worth of production,” says Darryl Hupfer, VP of sales and marketing for Microgravity Enterprises.
They’re spinning it pretty good, but I suspect it was the yeast that they flew into space. And their client, most likely, is nearby Kellys Brewpub, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As reported last year in the New Mexico Business Weekly, Kellys sent some yeast up in one of UP Aerospace’s rockets before but since it failed to reach suborbit (meaning that it didn’t reach the 45 mile-high threshold that defines where “space” begins) they brewed a beer they called “Test Flight Amber Ale.”
|
I have mixed feelings about this project because it seems so gimmicky and I know that the rocketed ingredients won’t make the beer taste any differently. But I am a former space geek — reinvigorated somewhat by my son Porter’s obsession with all things space-related — so it also seems like a fun idea, too. So I don’t wish to throw water on the fire or rain or their parade, but it also seems to be that this won’t be the “first true space beer” as the company claims. I’m pretty sure that the Apollo beer that was a contract beer around a decade ago used yeast that had been in space, too. It was in a distinctive blue bottle and they made an ale and a lager which was sold in six-packs. And I know that a German science experiment managed to get some yeast aboard one of the space shuttle flights. I know some of it they then used for research purposes, but I have a hard time believing they didn’t use at least some of it to brew a batch of beer. Who knows, perhaps Kellys also sent a few hop pellets in the rocket, too. In the end, it may come down simply to how you define a “true space beer.” |
Rob Tod Rocks the House
Rob Tod, the owner/founder of Allagash Brewing of Portland, Maine, was in San Francisco Friday for a beer dinner at the Cathedral Hill Hotel. Bruce Paton, the Beer Chef, put on his usual spectacular fête and the meal and pairings worked magnificently. All of Allagash’s beers are in a Belgian-style, though most are quite experimental. Rob Tod really worked the crowd and made a great impression both with his stories and his beer. Having missed Valley Brewing’s dinner last month, it was great to enjoy another of Bruce’s dinners. There were a number of friends there and a great time was had by one and all.
Rob Tod had the crowd in the palm in his hand talking about his beers.
The Main dish, cutlets of slow roasted lamb with fingerling potato risotto and bing cherry compote, which was paired with Allagash Inoculator. Inoculator is a “one-off” beer made almost by accident. It started with their triple, aged in bourbon barrels with cherries from their local market added. The yeast they used was from Rodenbach and helped create a delightful 9.5% beer.
Dave Keene, from the Toronado, won a raffle at the dinner to support a local chef’s organization. One of the items in his prize basket was “Shrimp flavored Chips.”
James Costa, from E.J. Phair Brewing, offers some to his wife, Caroline. Wisely, she declined. The smell alone was enough to produce a gag reflex.
Rob Tod, on the other hand, was brave enough to actually eat them.
Chef Bruce stopped by our table. From left, Dave Keene, Vinnie Cilurzo (from Russian River), Arne Johnson (from Marin Brewing), James Costa and his wife Caroline, and Rob Tod.
Chef Bruce also brought us a special bottle of Malheur Brut Reserve, Michael Jackson Commemorative Selection 2006. Yum.
The Malheur (at right) also worked well with the dessert, Banana Upside Down Cake with Butterscotch Mascarpone, though the official pairing, Allagash Curieux, was inspired. Curieux is a tripel aged in Jim Beam barrels.
Chef Bruce and Rob Tod, who respectively provided the food and beer for our dinner.
Malin Palssoa and Eric Schiff (from San Francisco Brewing), fans of the Bulletin at the dinner. At least I think that’s their names, I had trouble reading my own handwriting the next day.
Enjoying some Blind Pig IPA at the hotel bar after the dinner, Rob Tod and me.
Rogue Ales Brewery Tour
Chris Garrett, a Rogue employee created this humorous tour of the main brewery in Newport, Oregon. I first saw it during a seminar about internet marketing at the Craft Brewrers Conference this year. The speaker singled it out as a good way to use humor to reach your customer, but toward the end of it Garrett makes a little dig at the brewery’s owner, Jack Joyce. Jack was in the audience at the time and told the attendees that Garrett had been fired. He said it with a straight face, but knowing Jack’s sense of humor it’s hard to tell whether he was joking or not. He probably was, at least I hope so. At any rate, I recently came across it on YouTube and thought I’d share it since it is entertaining.
Beer Cheese Fondue
If you’re looking for something fun to try eating this Memorial weekend, this looks pretty tasty. It’s a recipe or “Beer Cheese Fondue,” which comes from Linda Larsen by way of About.com’s Busy Cooks
INGREDIENTS:
- 1 clove garlic, split in half
- 2 cups beer
- 1 lb. sharp Cheddar cheese, shredded
- 1 lb. mild Colby cheese, shredded
- 2 Tbsp. ketchup
- 1 Tbsp. Dijon mustard
- 2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 Tbsp. olive oil
- 1/2 tsp. hot red pepper sauce
PREPARATION:
Rub fondue pot with garlic and discard garlic. Pour beer into pot and heat over low heat until steam begins rising from surface.
In heavy skillet cook onion in olive oil until tender. Stir into fondue along with remaining ingredients and, stirring constantly, cook over low heat until melted and blended.
You may add more cheese or beer to reach the desired consistency. Serve immediately with dippers, including bread cubes, hot cooked sausages, and vegetables.
Fondue is one of those cheesy dishes — yes, pun intended — that had its social heyday in the swinging seventies. My mother had a fondue set and threw fondue parties, as did many of her friends. I’ve also been to one fondue restaurant, which was actually pretty good. Maybe it’s making a comeback, it’s not one of those things I pay attention to. But cheeseball perception of not, it’s very tasty, especially if you love cheese as much as I do. Putting beer into it and enjoying it with beer, too, could make it a lot of fun as a meal, too. I’m willing to give it a try, at least. Who’s with me?
The If You Were A Beer Test
I’m a sucker for quizzes of all stripes, be they tests of trivia, intelligence or knowledge. To me, the best pubs are the ones that host a trivia night once a week. My local when I lived in Cupertino, California, many years ago, the Britannia Arms, had a trivia league Tuesday nights with regular teams and season standings leading to a grand prize winner. It was great fun, and my only point is that I love to take tests. Weird, I know, but I even like to take those mostly meaningless personality tests. Case in point, there are a number of these that claim to determine what kind of beer you are based on a few questions about your personality. The latest one I stumbled upon, The If You Were A Beer Test, is on OK Cupid, an online dating website and was created by a 25-year old female member living in New York City, Gwendolyn Books.
There are nine simple questions, and she’s divided the quiz results into dark & bitter, working class, and genuine, presumably three questions apiece since my own score was 66% dark & bitter, 33% working class, 100% genuine and my own beer was Guinness, which the quiz claims as follows:
Okay, we all know Guinness is the best possible score on any “What Kind Of Beer Are You” test, so you can just go on and pat yourself on the back now. Like the world’s most famous brew, you’re genuine, you’ve got good taste, and you’re sophisticated. What else can I say, except congratulations?
If your friends didn’t score the same way, get ready for them to say: Guinness is too heavy; it’s an acquired taste; it’s too serious — and they probably think those things about you at times. But just brush ’em off. Everybody knows Guinness is the best. Cheers.
I don’t who she means by “everybody” but, of course, I don’t consider Guinness to be anywhere near the best. It’s not a bad beer per se, but it’s certainly lost its iconic status in my eyes, though I realize quite a number of people do still revere it. My wife, sadly, got Corona which, to her credit, she finds every bit as disgusting as I do. And in the end, that’s why as much I love these kinds of things they always tend to disappoint, because the range of beer in these things is decidedly narrow, despite the following cute little ditty that appears just before your beer personality is revealed.
If you were a beer, which would you be?
A Guinness, Sam Adams, or Old Milwaukee?Do you have a thick head? Are you dark, are you skunked?
Aged at the hands of obscure Trappist Monks?Are you stout, are you bitter, oaky like Fall,
Or like most of my coworkers, with no taste at all?However you are, here’s one test you can’t flunk,
All beers are okay, so long as you’re drunk.
At least she’s aware of Trappist Monks, Samuel Adams and the fact that beer can be skunked (especially popular brands like Corona and Heineken), and that put this quizmaster above most, if not all, of the other similar quizzes I’ve taken in the past. Still, I only have myself to blame. I guess I’ll have to add to my growing list of things I’d like to do in my copious free time making a quiz that’s more geared toward the many different styles of beer and the many different personality types. That could be fun. With my personality, though, I’d probably end up a sour beer.
What kind of beer are you? Not much here you’re fond of? I feel your pain.
Spinning the Beer Business
On Tuesday, August Busch IV addressed investors at the biannual “Investor Day” and unsurprisingly recent company woes were played down and the future looked so bright they probably should have passed out sunglasses to investors to reinforce the point. Given the less than enthusiastic analysis by Wall Street the week before, it’s not a stretch to consider the rosy predictions to be pure spin to mollify jumpy investors.
As usual, the business press went along with it, mostly reporting the spin without questioning it or even analyzing it to much of a degree. As reported in the New York Times, Busch boldly told investors “that profit would rise more than forecast this year on higher sales of imported beers and fewer discounts of Bud Light and Michelob.” Despite dismal sales gains and worse profits, A-B told its investors that the 1% gain realized in the second quarter was proof enough that things were finally looking up.
More curiously, Busch IV told shareholders “the company [this February] started to import beverages, including Stella Artois and Bass from InBev, to fend off rivals like SABMiller.” What’s odd about that statement to investors is that most conventional wisdom, both internally and externally, doesn’t blame SABMiller at all for A-B’s troubles, but craft beer, wine and spirits.
Busch IV also stated that “Anheuser-Busch is much better positioned for growth than we were just eight months ago,” but neither he — nor the Times — offers any explanation as to why that might be. All A-B said was that “[p]rofit will increase slower than forecast in the second quarter but accelerate in the second half of the year” and “[e]arnings on a share basis will increase this year more than the long-term growth of 7 percent to 10 percent that the company targets.” To me that sounds like code for don’t sell now, don’t bail on us, things will get better … eventually.
CNN Money reported that A-B did indeed see a 1% rise in sales this month, calling that a “rebound” after a poor showing the previous month. That’s a far more optimistic connotation of the word “rebound” than my dictionary allows, but that’s spin for you. In a related CNN Money article, “Anheuser-Busch profit disappoints,” A-B CFO W. Randolph Baker further spins the reasons for poor sales and even blames the weather. It’s this last one that produced in me a rare guffaw. Certainly there is a close and well-documented correlation between the weather and beer sales. The warmer the weather, the better the sales — it’s hardly rocket science. But when I was the beer buyer at Beverages & more and was expected to hit sales targets it was the one excuse for falling short, no matter how legitimate, that I was all forbidden to use. Apparently, I was expected to predict the weather and plan for it — I never quite understood how I could be held responsible for factors outside my control but such was the pressure cooker of retail. Anyway, to hear the CFO of the biggest beer company in the world blame the weather for not hitting their own sales targets strikes me as pretty funny and suggests that A-B doesn’t really have a good idea as to what exactly is causing their sales to remain mostly flat. Baker claims to be “uncomfortable saying it’s only a weather story,” which says to me he’s not supposed to use that excuse any more than I was.
Dow Jones’ Marketwatch also predictably spins it A-B’s way, titling their take “Anheuser says back on growth track.” The MarketWatch take begins accepting Bud’s pronouncements. “Citing a bigger and better beer portfolio [the InBev imports – failing to mention distributor issues], favorable pricing trends [unilaterally deciding not to discount their own products hardly constitutes a trend], international opportunities [despite everyone saying it’s the core brands at home that are the issue] and a modest rebound in domestic sales [the 1% rise in the first half of May], Anheuser-Busch said Tuesday that it is back on a growth track, but perhaps not so much right away [yes, in the future, always the future].
“Busch said that consumers are increasingly ‘active’ rather than ‘passive’ and added that ‘we have to evolve how we do business … to combine our supply-side strength with a new and equally powerful demand expertise.'” While that may be true, Bud.TV (rumored to be shut down shortly), MingleNow and even Here’s to Beer have not exactly taught A-B about the “powerful demand expertise” many consumers are looking for. They didn’t even mention Raymond Hill, their curious new venture with a faux or stealth “craft beer” that’s made by A-B.
MarketWatch lastly detailed A-B’s forays into making spirits, with mixed results:
But with beer continuing to lose share in the alcohol market, he said that the company needs to move beyond the category and into “high-margin segments with exceptional potential. … We will target products and categories where we can drive growth.” That is a not-so-veiled reference to hard liquor, which has been booming just as domestic brew fades. A-B has made some baby steps — and missteps — in that direction, developing both distilled spirits and higher-alcohol malt beverages in a small way.
Last year, the company launched “Jekyll & Hyde,” two “nesting” bottles of spirits meant to be mixed together and downed as a shot. It also rolled out Spykes, a 12% alcohol malt-based product sold in tiny perfume-like bottles. That experiment was a disaster and the company announced it would stop making the stuff last week due to poor sales and attacks by advocacy groups that claimed it appealed to underage drinkers.
It was a little strange that craft beer’s gains were not addressed — at least not by the media as far as I can tell — since they’re the only category of alcoholic beverages that’s showing significant growth at the present time. Perhaps we’re still too small to bring up at investor meetings.
All of this emphasis on international markets, non-beer products and their “packaging and entertainment businesses” as a way out of the morass seems odd given that everybody and their mother cites inattention to their core brands as the biggest problem A-B is facing. A-B’s Tuesday press release does mention the core brands, but it all sounds like doublespeak and gobbledegook to me. Here’s what they had to say about their core product lines:
Senior managers from Anheuser-Busch’s U.S. beer company presented their plans to grow the company’s core trademark brands and actively pursue high-end growth opportunities. The company is making good progress in digesting the series of new growth initiatives recently undertaken and managing the added complexity associated with an expanded portfolio. In citing incremental revenue growth as a key objective, the executives stated that the pricing environment in the U.S. beer industry is favorable.
Now I speak jargon, in fact I’m relatively fluent in it, but “actively pursue high-end growth opportunities,” “making good progress in digesting the series of new growth initiatives recently undertaken,” “managing the added complexity associated with an expanded portfolio,” and “the pricing environment in the U.S. beer industry is favorable” are tortuously vague and unnecessarily convoluted to me. They all sound impressive but don’t really seem to say very much. It’s the same old hackneyed platitudes gussied up in fancy dress words to confuse the hoi polloi. In English, all they’re planning is “to sell as much as they can,” “figure out which new brands are selling and which aren’t,” “rolling out the new import and domestic brands they gobbled up last year,” and “not discounting their prices to wholesalers and retailers as much as in previous years.” Now was that so hard to say?
At the same time Anheuser-Busch is trying to persuade shareholders that everything’s fine and that their stock will be up again, they’ve also announced that they’re “looking to slash hundreds of millions of dollars in costs over the next few years,” according to an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That’s the sort of thing investors and Wall Street tends to applaud but generally isn’t too great for all the unemployed that such measures leave in their wake. A-B is looking to “trim $300 million to $400 million in costs over the next four years,” and you now that’s got to include layoffs. The increased high-tech robotics that A-B is using in its operations certainly doesn’t suggest more hirings, but less, despite the fact that they’re asking current employees to slash their own throats by submitting ” ideas under a productivity plan called ‘Project Blue Ocean.'”
Also somewhat scary for those of us who don’t relish the idea of A-B buying out craft brewers is the announcement that new guidelines A-B approved last year will allow them to take on more debt, with an eye toward getting “more involved in mergers and acquisitions.” So look for another round of rumors on who might be up for grabs later this year.
None of this spin doctoring is unique to A-B, of course, it’s the stock in trade of all large modern corporations. But this was Augie number IV’s first time in front of the investors since taking over the family business last year so it’s worth noting that things haven’t changed very much under his leadership. I’d say we’re in for more efforts at maintaining the status quo as the year continues to unfold. Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.