Brookston Beer Bulletin

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Taybeh Beer Update

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teybah
A couple of days ago, I posted a video from Palestine’s only brewery, Taybeh Beer, founded in 1993 by Nadim Khoury, who learned to homebrew while living in Boston. I admit that I wondered how the beer tastes, so I was delighted to hear from fellow beer blogger David Turley, who writes Musings Over A Pint. Turley had an opportunity to try the beer during a trip with his family to Jerusalem last August. He recently posted his impressions of the beer and stories from his pilgrimage in Taybeh, A Beer Without A Country. Give it a read, it definitely helps round out the story. Thanks for your insights David.

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A postcard from Taybeh (courtesy of David Turley).

Saturday Toast To Don Younger

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don-younger
There’s at least one more worldwide toast to Portland Publican Don Younger. This one is set to take place at 5:00 p.m. YLT (your local time) on Saturday, February 26. It was organized by Phil Farrel, who you probably will recognize as “The Rubber Chicken Man.”

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Phil Farrell

Phil gave me a flier about the toast during SF Beer Week, and I’ve gotten several e-mails about the toast now, so I figured I should help spread the word, too. The BA’s CraftBeer.com also mentions it in a post by Celebrator publisher Tom Dalldorf entitled A Toast To: Don Younger 1941-2011.

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Don raising a pint with Jonathan and Robin Surratt during GABF in 2007. On Saturday we should all do likewise.

Beer In Ads #317: Carling, People Try It … And They Like It

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ad-billboard
Wednesday’s ad is for Carling Black Label, one of a series of ads with the slogan “People try it … and they like it.” Each ad I’ve seen seems to feature a different unique beer glass. The one in this ad had an etched stem, and tapers up from a wide base to even wider open mouth rim. That’s not a glass I see much these days. Does anybody know if it has a specific name?

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Indianapolis Man Wins “Brew Your Cask Off” Contest

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all-about-beer
A couple of weeks ago, All About Beer magazine conducted a contest, to win a trip to the “Brew Your Cask Off” beer festival hosted by Georgia’s SweetWater Brewing in Atlanta, Georgia on March 5, 2011.

The winner had to write an essay explaining what type of cask they’d brew, in 300 words or less. The winner, Matt Robinson, from Indianapolis, Indiana, wrote a poem which won him and a friend a trip to SweetWater Brewery’s cask festival.

From the press release:

Matt will also be a honorary judge for the cask ale competition and be a server for a cask made from his hilarious and precise poem.

Without a doubt one of the most unusual, and clever beer events, SweetWater Brewery’s Brew Your Cask Off features 80 different cask ales made by a full range of celebrities and not so celebrities, including dignitaries from the beer media, non-profits and retailers from the metro Atlanta beer community. All About Beer Magazine publisher Daniel Bradford participated in making a cask named Adam’s All About Beer Ale, after the SweetWater brewer who guided the actual cask ale production. The cask ale festival features a judging of all the casks with the winner getting serious bragging rights, including being brewed by SweetWater Brewery, and the loser getting the much coveted, and highly decorated golden toilet seat.

Matt Robinson will join a collection of very talented palates as a honorary judge helping chose the best cask of the festival. During the festival itself, Matt will have the pleasure of presenting a cask made from the numerous clues he provided in his winning poem.

Runners up included second place finisher Steve Forbes who wrote a passionate sensory entry. Third place went to Michael Iris who described how his hound found an unusual cache of berries that would have made a wonderful cask. Both of these entries and the other finishers can be found at All About Beer.

The winning entry is below. Enjoy.

aab-cask-off

What Cask Should An American Brew? by Matt Robinson

What cask should an American Brew?
But nothing less than around 55 I-Be-Yous!
I would add subtle flavor with East Kents
Perhaps more for hop compliment
Throw in some fuggles and American C’s
Many will say it’s the knees of bees!
Powerful flavor will be most divine
Even with a gravity around one-thousand nine
The grain bill is full of Golden Promise Malt
This great American session cask has no fault
The hydrometer reading will need to state
Around 3.55% alcohol by weight
This may sound like an English creation
With bold American style is my summation
Lovibond sounds nice somewhere near ten
Many hours with our cask we will all spend!
Wyeast numbered Nineteen Forty-Five
Will make our cask come alive!
Gravity-fed like our English brethren
Cask beer please take hold for American beer drinking heaven
Deep in the south in town called Atlanta
Our cask brings so much joy we call it Santa!
All the people will come and stand
To sing play us a song you’re the piano man!

CBA Out Of Cash?

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craft-brewers-alliance
Ouch, this doesn’t sound good, sad to say. The Motley Fool is reporting that the Craft Brewers Alliance is out of cash. In a post entitled Who’s Broke Now?, they indicate that the combined corporation that includes Widmer, RedHook, Kona and Goose Island “had only $13,000 in cash in its last reported numbers” and on top of that is “$19 million in debt.” I hope there’s more too it than that, because those are not good numbers. Anheuser-Busch InBev still owns 35% of CBA, but it’s unclear if they’d bail them out or even if that would be desirable.

Simplifying Tasting Descriptions

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pour-the
Eric Asimov, who writes The Pour for the New York Times, had a very interesting post today on simplifying tasting notes for wine, entitled Wine in Two Words. Here’s the crux of his idea:

While it may seem heretical to say, the more specific the description of a wine, the less useful information is actually transmitted. See for yourself. All you have to do is compare two reviewers’ notes for a single bottle: one critic’s ripe raspberry, white pepper and huckleberry is another’s sweet-and-sour cherries and spice box. What’s the solution? Well, if you feel the urgent need to know precisely what a wine is going to taste like before you sniff and swallow, forget it. Experience will give you a general idea, but fixating on exactitude is a fool’s errand. Two bottles of the same wine can taste different depending on when, where and with whom you open them.

Besides, the aromas and flavors of good wines can evolve over the course of 20 minutes in a glass. Perhaps they can be captured momentarily like fireflies in a child’s hands, yet reach for them again a minute later and — whiff! — they’re somewhere else.

But the general character of a wine: now, that’s another matter. A brief depiction of the salient overall features of a wine, like its weight, texture and the broad nature of its aromas and flavors, can be far more helpful in determining whether you will like that bottle than a thousand points of detail. In fact, consumers could be helped immeasurably if the entire lexicon of wine descriptors were boiled down to two words: sweet or savory.

Asimov goes on to give greater detail to his idea of simplification, going so far that at the end he gives a list of varietals and where they fall in the sweet or savory list, admitting obvious exceptions will occur. And while I believe beer flavors are somewhat more complex, because of a greater number of ingredients and the endless combinations of them along with variations in the brewing process, the basic notions are sound and applicable.

Like wine, it’s true that the flavors of a particular beer change as it warms, too, and on any given day there are numerous things that can effect how a beer tastes. But even so, I don’t think you could distill beer down to just two descriptors. But I could see a smaller number being devised that could be useful in communicating basic information about the expectations of how a beer might taste, or at least its core components. There are specific styles that certainly have very recognizable characteristics, but just as many don’t or are exceptions to any rules. In a sense beer is like the English language, where there’s an exception to virtually every rule. Still it might be worth the effort to try and see what emerges and whether it could be useful. Anybody have any thoughts?

Beer In Ads #315: What Great Americans Favored Beer As A Beverage Of Moderation?

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Monday’s ad is from 1951 and ran in Newsweek. It was produced by the U.S. Brewers Foundation, one of a series of historical ads showing the positive side of beer in a post-Prohibition America, a world, like today, in which the neo-prohibitionists continued nipping at their heels despite Prohibition’s massive, unmitigated failure. The ad answers the question “What Great Americans Favored Beer As A Beverage Of Moderation?” with “Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Patrick Henry—to name just a few.” Since today is Presidents Day, and their list includes three early American presidents, it seemed a good way to celebrate by remembering there was a time when beer wasn’t under constant attack and our most popular politicians openly supported it. Happy Presidents Day.

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As We Like It

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history
Thanks to Stan Hieronymus and Andrew Mason for tipping me to this little gem. It’s a pro-beer promotional film from 1952, created by the United States Brewers Foundation, the same trade group that created the Beer Belongs series. Using the tagline “sparkling, golden, pure, refreshing, a beverage as old as history,” it’s a great little gem of trying to promote the positive aspects of beer in the wake of Prohibition’s end. Enjoy.

Beer In Art #115: Ralston Crawford’s Buffalo Grain Elevators

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art-beer
This week’s work of art is by the Canadian-born artist Ralston Crawford. He spent his childhood in Buffalo, and most of the rest of his life traveling and in America, which is reflected in his oeuvre. Today’s painting, Buffalo Grain Elevators, was completed in 1937 and today is part of the Smithsonian Institute’s American Art Museum and is a part of their Scenes of American Life collection.

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The Scenes of American Life exhibition describes the painting like this:

The huge grain elevators lining the waterfront in Buffalo, New York, fascinated Crawford, who transformed bridges, factories, and other modern industrial structures into volumes and planes. Here he contrasts the massive cylinders of the elevators with the thin lines of the pitched roof in the foreground, the delicate rungs of a ladder, and a series of gently sloping wires.

There’s a biography of Crawford at Wikipedia and also at the Smithsonian Institute and the Hollis Taggert Galleries. You can also find links to more of Crawford’s art at the ArtCyclopedia.