Tuesday’s ad is for Ballantine Ale from 1949 and take an unusual approach. The ad highlights three hotels and restaurants carrying Ballantine Ale, and especially their servers. These include the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, the Ambassador’s Pump Room in Chicago, Illinois and the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California.
For several years now, Rubicon Brewing in Sacramento has hosted an event celebrating women in brewing. This year’s Women in Brewing Main Event will take place this Saturday, April 16 all day long. Rubicon is located at 2004 Capitol Avenue in Sacramento.
From the press release:
Join us for our annual celebration of women in the craft brew industry! We’ve got some fantastic beers in store for y’all, including special brews from Sierra Nevada, Lost Coast, Auburn Alehouse, Stone, Santa Cruz Mountain, Blue Frog, Moylan’s, and more! So, stop in, have a pint, and chat with some amazing Women Brewsters. And above all … the event benefits a great organization, W.E.A.V.E.!
Monday’s ad is for Schlitz from 1952 featuring the once popular hobby of Ham Radio operating. With, presumably, the missus thoughtfully bringing in a tray of Schlitz and a pilsner glass. Apparently, that’s the message from Milwaukee, not whatever’s coming over the airwaves.
This week’s works of art are by Johann Georg Hinz, a German painter from Hamburg. His last name was also sometime spelled Hintz, Hainz or Heintz. He was born in 1630, in Altona, but spent most of his life painting in Hamburg, where he’s best known for his still life paintings. Many of them had beer in the painting — it was Germany after all — like the first one below: Still Life with Beer Glass.
And the second is simply Still Life.
And here’s a third, also titled simply Still Life.
There’s no dates for any of them, though Hinz is believed to have spent some time in Amsterdam and came to Hamburg in the 1660s. I was in Amsterdam he picked up the idea for still life painting and was the first to paint them in Hamburg, and possibly in Germany, too. You can see a few more of paintings at WikiGallery.
When did homebrewing become so hard that people still want to do it but are looking for ways around the actual work of the brewing? First there was Brewbot: An Automated Homebrewing Machine, by an Australian designer, and now comes WilliamsWarn: The Personal Brewery, this time from New Zealand. Is it perhaps the folks down under who are getting lazy? (And thanks to brewer Andrew Mason for the hat tip.)
So brewmaster Ian Williams and food technologist (not sure what that is) Anders Warn worked for two years to develop the WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery, which looks as much like a fancy coffee machine as anything else.
Here’s their “story” from the website:
The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery is the miracle that beer drinkers have been praying for. After 5000 years of brewing, the technology finally exists to allow you to brew the perfect beer. Your Personal Brewery is a breakthrough created by our brewmasters through a combination of their deep love of beer and their extensive knowledge of brewing.
In 2004, whilst Ian was working out of Denmark as an international brewing consultant and professional beer taster, he was challenged by his Uncle (a frustrated homebrewer) to invent the worlds first personal brewery. After 2 years part-time research he returned to New Zealand in 2006 and started fulltime research and development with help from his friend, Anders Warn. Finally in 2011, after several rounds of serious investment, after 100 brews and blind tastings and after many industrial prototypes, the first units and the ingredients to be used in them are ready for sale.
So after 5 years of intense development, the result is cold, perfectly carbonated, clear, commercial quality beer made in 7 days, like a modern brewery. All 78 official beer styles can be made as well as the option to develop your own.
I have to say I’m skeptical, especially watching them pour the malt syrup into the contraption. And it’s not exactly cheap, either, at $5,666 NZD (which is roughly $4,436 in American dollars). It seems like it would take quite a few 23 litre batches (about 6 gallons) before it would pay for itself. And the ingredients to make one batch is $49-52 NZD ($50 = $39 USD). So after purchasing the machine, it costs $39 per batch, getting you roughly 6 gallons of beer, or the equivalent of 2 2/3 cases of 12 oz. bottles or roughly 10 six-packs with a few bottles extra). Not including the price of the machine, the cost would be about $4 per six-pack, saving you maybe $2 for a macro brew and $4-5 per craft beer sixer. Let’s call it $4 savings per six-pack ($40 per batch) and it would take you 110 batches before you broke even.
Ian Williams and Anders Warn with their Personal Brewery.
Watch the video to get a better idea of what it’s all about and how it works. What do you think? Am I crazy, or are these contraptions a bad idea that subvert the very idea of what it means to be a homebrewer? Throughout the press materials for the Personal Brewery, they talk about how it was just too hard to homebrew and the founder’s uncle wanted a simpler way to keep making beer at home. But I can’t help but wonder. Maybe his uncle should have given up and just bought beer from professionals. Does making beer using a machine that does all the work still constitute homebrewing? Certainly many of the bigger brewery’s systems are automated at various stages in the process. But I tend to think of homebrewing as a learning experience, where you learn to be a better brewer by doing, by putting in the time and the hard work. These homebrewing systems seem designed for a lazy person who wants to call themselves a “homebrewer” but without putting in any of the effort. An automatic personal brewery seems less like a hobby and more like having yet another kitchen gadget just to impress your friends. Though it’s hard not to be impressed with the engineering of it, and it is a beautiful looking machine. What do you think?
Our 63rd Guinness ad shows our intrepid toucan as a miner, working away down below. But instead of finding gold nuggets, he instead finds black gold, not Texas tea, but Guinness. It’s one of the usual slogans again, “My Goodness, My Guinness.”
I just learned the sad news from my friend Pete Slosberg that brewmaster Pierre Celis passed away today, around 8:00 p.m. Belgian time. He was 86. A funeral is scheduled for next Saturday in Hoegaarden, after which, according to his wishes, he’ll be cremated.
Celis was a true brewing legend, he single-handedly revived the style witbier in the 1960s when he was a brewer at Hoegaarden. He later moved to Texas to start a microbrewery with his daughter Christine, which was sold to Miller in 1995. He was still brewing, making three cave-aged beers under the label Grottenbier at St. Bernardus in Belgium. Join me in raising a toast to Pierre’s memory this evening, with a Hoegaarden if you can get one, or if not a Belgian or Belgian-style witbier.
Me and Pierre at GABF five years ago in 2006.
Friday’s ad is for Schlitz from 1949 showing a close-up of a can and a bottle, with a full beer glass in what appears to be a library setting. You can just make out on one of the leather-bound books that the first word in the title is “beer.” Though there is one discrepancy. Notice that the bottle isn’t even half empty but the beer glass is full. There’s no way that portion of the bottle could fill a beer glass that looks to be at least 12 oz., if not a full pint. Hmm.
There was in an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times a few days ago. A wine blogger, David White (founder of the Terroirist), tackled the thorny issue of shipping wine (and beer and liquor) from state to state in a piece entitled Wholesale Robbery in Liquor Sales.
He begins with this obvious logic:
IMAGINE if Texas lawmakers, in a bid to protect mom-and-pop bookstores, barred Amazon.com from shipping into the state. Or if Massachusetts legislators, worried about Boston’s shoe boutiques, prohibited residents from ordering from Zappos.com.
Such moves would infuriate consumers. They might also breach the Constitution’s commerce clause, which limits states from erecting trade barriers against one another. But wine consumers, producers and retailers face such restrictions daily.
While he’s focusing on wine, the same is true for beer, too. When it comes to alcohol, the general rules of commerce tend to get thrown out the window because — gasp — it’s alcohol, and people can’t be trusted with the stuff. Therefore separate laws have to be set up to protect us from … well, I’m not sure from what. You can order all manner of dangerous things through the mail and have them sent right to your door, from guns and ammo, knives, crow bars along with all the stuff you need to make good size bomb. But try to get bombed and forget it. That’s where the line has been drawn.
It’s been over 75 years since Prohibition ended and few of the laws enacted to ease alcohol back into society have been updated much in that time. The way of the world, I’d argue, is quite a bit different than it was in 1933. The way people do business, both as companies and consumers, has changed dramatically but the laws governing alcohol have remained largely static, in large part because there’s always a hue and cry any time someone suggests relaxing or changing them. White points to wholesalers as having the greatest incentive to keep the status quo, and he’s certainly partly correct, but it’s also the anti-alcohol types and the overarching belief by many that because a few people can’t handle themselves with alcohol, that the rest of us have to suffer under these anachronistic laws that never envisioned the internet or considered that most adults might actually take personal responsibility for their actions.
At any rate, White makes some great points and his article is definitely worth a read.
Our 51st Session is the third of our run at nostalgia, albeit a mere four years worth of it. Stan Hieronymus first proposed the Session four years ago, and was the first host, too, followed by Alan (from A Good Beer Blog) and then I hosted the third outing.
So here I am venturing into Area 51, and while I tried to keep things simple, I just couldn’t help myself and have made the topic one that will require a little work, but I think the challenge will be worth it and great fun in the end. It involves two of my favorite things: beer and cheese. Before I spring the particulars on you, first a little background about where the idea came from.
I’ve been to many cheese and beer tastings, whether part of a structured dinner or a separate dedicated cheese event. In almost every case, whoever put on the tasting chose the beer and the cheese. If you’ve done likewise, I’m assuming you’ve had the same experience. Some pairings work, others don’t. Whichever way it goes, you usually only get one shot at it, that is just one cheese paired with one beer.
But finding that divine pairing always made the effort worthwhile because when it works, boy does it ever. A perfect pairing of cheese and beer is practically spiritual. At least to me, but as I say; I love cheese.
So I was thrilled when someone figured out another way to sample cheese and beer. During the first SF Beer Week three years ago, Vic Kralj — who owns The Bistro in Hayward — hosted a different kind of cheese and beer event: the “cheese-off.” What Vic did was pick five cheeses and then invited five breweries to play along. Each brewery took the five cheeses and paired each with one of their beers.
So then on the night of the event, attendees got a plate of each cheese, in turn, along with the five beers (one chosen by each of the five breweries). You then tried each beer with the cheese and then picked the pairing you thought worked best. That continued through each of the five cheeses. Then they tallied up the votes — just for fun — to see which beer was the most popular with each cheese. The Bistro hosted a cheese-off two years, and you can read the write-up for the 2009 Cheese-Off and the 2010 Cheese-Off to get a better idea of how it worked.
That brings us back to Session #51, and the topic of cheese and beer. Below are three cheeses. I chose ones that I believe are available throughout the U.S. and quite possibly beyond our shores. And they all sell via mail order, too. So pick up some of each, or if you can’t find those specific cheeses, choose similar ones. Pick a beer to pair with each one and post your results on the first Friday in May.
There are at least a few approaches you could take:
This is one my favorite blues, and not just because it’s owned by the Maytag family, who until recently owned Anchor Brewery. The Maytag Dairy Farm was founded in Iowa by Fritz Maytag’s father in 1941, making it one of the first artisanal cheese companies in America. One of my favorite ways to use Maytag Blue is to crumble some on top of a bowl of chili, something I tried at an Anchor event where both were being served. It’s a terrific combination.
To get you started, Stephen Beaumont and Brian Morin, in their “beerbistro cookbook,” suggest barley wine or even imperial stout for blue cheese. In the “Brewmaster’s Table,” author Garret Oliver doesn’t mention blue cheese, but does suggest Barley Wines with Stilton, which is a specific type of blue cheese.
I wanted to make sure I included at least one Wisconsin cheese — I am a cheesehead, after all — and Widmer’s Cheese Cellars makes some great golden orange cheddars. Even the one-year old aged cheddar is very full-flavored. Widmer’s website described it as having “rich, nutty flavor [that] becomes increasingly sharp with age. Smooth, firm texture becomes more granular and crumbly with age.”
For milder cheddars, Beaumont and Morin suggest brown ales or pale ales, and for older, sharper cheddars, IPAs or strong abbey ales. Likewise, in the “Brewmaster’s Table,” Oliver suggests India Pale Ales with cheddar cheese.
Humboldt Fog is a goat cheese from Cypress Grove Chevre in California. It’s described on their website as a “soft, surface ripened cheese. The texture is creamy and luscious with a subtle tangy flavor. Each handcrafted wheel features a ribbon of edible vegetable ash along its center and a coating of ash under its exterior to give it a distinctive, cake-like appearance.”
In the Brewmaster’s Table, Oliver suggests “a spicy Belgian beer with residual sweetness,” and specifically Ommegang’s Hennepin. Beaumont and Morin recommend Belgian-style wheat beer or doppelbocks for goat cheese generally.
You can also find some general information about cheese at Artisanal Cheese, the American Cheese Society and the California Artisan Cheese Guild. And there’s some more pairing tips available from Lucy Saunders, the beer cook, Taste of Home and Artisanal Cheese
So that’s the three cheeses. To participate in the May Session, pick them (or similar ones) up and pair them with whatever beer you feel will best enhance the two, using whatever method you want. Then on May 6th, post your results. Let everybody know what you think are the best beers to pair with these three cheeses.
So that’s the regular Session. But wait … there’s more.
Okay, I know not everyone will want to go for this, but if you’re with me so far here’s the idea for part two. As soon as I can after the May 6th Session, I’ll post the round-up with a list of all the beers that everyone suggested to pair with each of the cheeses. Then over the subsequent two weeks, whoever wants to participate, pick up some of the other beers that were suggested, and try them with the same three cheeses and do a follow up blog post on Friday, May 20 — let’s call it Session #51.5 — to explore more fully pairing cheese and beer.
You can write about how your choices compared, or what you learned from the other suggestions, or which out of all the ones you tried worked best. What recommended pairing most surprised you? Which didn’t seem to work at all, for you? It’s my way of taking the Session concept and making it more interactive and collaborative, essentially an “online cheese-off.” First, we each make our best recommendations for pairing a beer with these three cheeses, and then we try as many of the suggestions as we can, and discover which is the best one. I’ll then do a second round-up and try to report the findings of the group as a whole to the beers and the three cheeses together.
Spread the cheese .. er, the word. Even with making this next Session as difficult as possible, I’m hoping the fun factor of trying these cheeses with a lot of beer will make for a lively and interesting Session, with a lot of participation. If you agree, let’s get the word out and get people on board to do some beer and cheese pairing.
To participate, post a comment here with a link to your blog post for Session #51. To keep going with Session #51.5, post your link on or after May 20 to the round-up which should be up on May 7.