This week’s work of art is by Pablo Picsasso, created using pasted paper and charcoal on cardboard in the Spring of 1914. It’s title is Glass and Bottle of Bass. Though it certainly doesn’t look like any bottle of Bass Ale I’ve ever seen.
There’s a biography of Picasso at Wikipedia and also Biography.com. You can also see more of Picasso’s art at Olga’s Gallery, ArtArchive and the ArtCyclopedia. Then there’s Picasso.com and his “official” website.
In June of 1933, just as Prohibition was in its death throes, that month’s issue of Popular Science magazine ran a two-page spread entitled Beer Making Is Marvel Of Industrial Chemistry, illustrated by Benjamin Goodwin Seielstad. It’s great fun to see it all laid out the way it’s done here. It seems like they were laying the groundwork for the return of brewing in America.
There’s not a great deal of text accompanying the chart, but here it is in its entirety, from page two of the beer making chart:
With the removal of national restrictions against the manufacture and sale of beer, American brewers are again in action. Their operations represent one of the most extensive applications of modern industrial chemistry. More than 2,000,000,000 pounds of malt, 650,000,000 pounds of corn and corn products, and 41,000,000 pounds of hops are a part of the vast consignment of raw materials that experts will turn each year into beer. On these pages, our artist shows how the transformation is accomplished in one big, and now active, American brewery.
Beer is the fermented product of malted or sprouted grain, usually barley. Its manufacture requires the conversion of the grain’s starch into fermentable sugar, and the transformation of this sugar, by fermentation, into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. During the process, the beer is given its characteristic bitter flavor by the addition of hops, the yellowish-green cones or catkins of the hop vine.
Malt, the principal raw material, has previously been produced by steeping, sprouting, and drying barley. Germination develops an important enzyme or digestive fluid called diastase, capable of turning the malt’s starch into sugar. Since this task does not exhaust the enzyme’s power, additional starch in the form of corn or rice is often added at the start of the brewing operation. Subsequent steps from the mash to the final product are explained in the drawings. The color of the finished beer depends upon the raw materials; natural malt yields a pale beer, while caramelized, or heat-treated, malt gives a dark beer.
Our 60th Guinness ad shows the iconic toucan riding a dart on its way to the dartboard, all the while holding two pints of Guinness on its beak. The slogan isn’t one of the regular ones, but is specific to the ad itself: “Aim For A Guinness.”
Friday’s ad is another Ballantine ad from, I’m guessing here, the late 50s or early 60s. I love the suggestion that Ballantine is “deep-brewed,” whatever that might mean. And I can’t help but wonder: what the hell is that rooster doing on his shoulder as he pours his beer?
Thursday’s ad is from 1949, a Ballantine ad that’s all green, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. My initial thought is that it was printed in a magazine that wasn’t full color but instead used spot color, in this case black and green. But it works pretty well. And I love the slogan: “A flavor you will find in no other beverage.”
The Daily Meal, a food-oriented website, has come up with a list of The 50 Most Important Inventions (and Discoveries) in Food and Drink. It’s a pretty interesting list, and at the very least got me thinking about how much we take for granted and how important so many of those simple items are to the enjoyment of our lives.
The process of creating the list began with saying to yourself. “I simply couldn’t cook without my….”
Everybody who prepares food at home (or professionally, for that matter) has an implement or appliance or five or ten of them that they consider essential to their culinary practices. But how many of these things really matter in the larger scheme of things? How many are truly essential, or at least very important, to the preparation — and the ultimate consumption — of food (and let’s throw drink in here as well, just to wash it all down with)?
We were sitting around talking about this one day and came up with the obvious candidates: pots and pans, the knife, the oven, the (hey, we’re up-to-date around here) food processor… Then somebody said, well, what about the things nobody invented but somebody figured out or harnessed — like, er, fire, without which cooking as we understand it would never have been born? And what about methods of collecting food, means of storing or preserving it, ways of taming it? We started making a list, including not just things we have in our own kitchens (salt, four-sided grater) but also natural phenomena (fermentation) and specialized tools (sous-vide equipment — which we don’t have in our own kitchens yet).
We decided to leave out foodstuffs — miraculous innovations that became veritable building blocks of civilization, like bread, wine, cheese, vinegar, bacon-cheeseburgers — though we did include two substances that we ingest, salt and gelling agents. We left out all the vehicles and devices with which food is planted and harvested (with one exception; see below); we omitted broad concepts like the domestication of animals and the development of genetic studies, though both have obviously had enormous effect on what and how we eat (among other things); we decided not to include means of conveying information about food, from the book to the iPad.
What we ended up with is a list of things that we, yes, simply couldn’t cook — or eat and/or drink — without. As usual with such compendiums, we have been both selective and subjective. We’ve probably missed some obvious and vital items, and we have frankly allowed ourselves to have a little fun here and there. Should you decide to assemble such a list yourself, of course, it would almost certainly not be the same as ours.
Here’s the first five:
All pretty important, no doubt. And at number 6? Drum roll, please …
Awesome, well-deserved. Seven more alcohol-related items also made the list.
Some other faves that made the cut included the blender, the restaurant and the fork. Personally, I would have put the Deep-Fryer higher than 32, but then I probably eat fried food every day. But it’s a fun list, despite many commenters taking it way too seriously. Here you can see the full list. But I have to ask, why do we always say something is the best thing since sliced bread. Besides that, what would you add?
I should say at the outset that I love Colorado. I go there at least once a year, have many beer friends and colleagues there. There are many, many great breweries there and their beer culture should be celebrated. Of that, I believe there can be no doubt. And in fact, a new documentary film is seeking to do just that, a laudable enterprise. The title is Beer Culture: the Movie, and the idea behind it is the following. “Beer Culture is a documentary film about the growing rich American Culture in Craft Beer by telling the inspirational stories of unwavering motivation by some of Colorado’s top Brewers.” It’s release date is Summer 2011. Frankly, I can’t wait, it looks great. Free Mind Productions should be proud of what they’ve done so far. They’ve also just released a new trailer with tons of great teasers, and lots of great people being interviewed, including Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, Eric Wallace, Marty Jones and Charlie Papazian.
But then at just past the one minute mark, one of the interviewees — I’m not sure who it is — says the following. “Pretty much everybody thinks of Colorado as the birthplace of craft brewing.” Really? Um, did I miss a meeting? That just sticks in my craw. Hyperbole is one thing, but that’s simply a false statement that is just not true. I know the producers didn’t say it, but they’re sure seizing it on it to promote their film. It’s not one of those subjective facts that people can interpret different ways, like who brewed the first Black IPA. We know Fritz Maytag bought the ailing Anchor Brewery in 1965 and turned into what it is today. We know Jack McAuliffe incorporated New Albion Brewery in Sonoma, California in October of 1976 and built the first modern microbrewery from scratch. Colorado’s first microbrewery was the Boulder Beer Company, which was founded in September of 1979. Those are the facts, plain and simple.
Maybe I’m being oversensitive, but I don’t think so. Last week, John Kerry was quoted in a press release about the new BEER Act that’s been introduced in the Senate that the “craft beer revolution started right here in Massachusetts.” Now this. I believe that Colorado has much to celebrate with its beer culture, but it doesn’t really need to take liberties with the truth to do that. It doesn’t need to throw California’s contributions under the bus to raise up its own. I don’t really feel like I should have to protect California’s place in the history of craft brewing. It seems like it should be fairly secure and unassailable, but here we are. I hope enough people will see fit to point this out to the producers of Beer Culture and they’ll remove it from the movie. They don’t need to keep something so blatantly untrue in there and for me, at least, it just mars the film’s credibility. The story of Colorado’s craft beer scene is a great and worthy subject for a movie, but it can only be improved by sticking to the facts … and the beer.
Wednesday’s ad is an odd one, I’m not really sure what the ad was for, or indeed if it’s even an add at all. But still, it’s a great image of the green bottle with legs and arms and the tagline “for a better day.” The artist’s name is apparently Assuma, but that’s about all I know.
Monday marked the 25th anniversary of Triple Rock Brewery & Alehouse’s opening in 1986. Triple Rock was the third brewpub to open in California, the fifth in the U.S., and the only one still owned and operated by the original founders — John and Reid Martin. I stopped by this afternoon to join in the celebration and partake of the special beers that brewmaster Rodger Davis whipped up for the occasion.
The Triple Rock truck was running again and parked out front.
Davis re-created Batch No. 1, the first beer Triple Rock brewed.
The first beer John and Reid brewed was a pale ale created on Christmas Day in 1985. Rodger altered the recipe slightly to account for different yeast and varied the amount of hops.
Several former Triple Rock brewers stopped by for the party, including Shaun O’Sullivan, co-founder of 21st Amendment, whose first brewing job was at Triple Rock.
AT 5:00 p.m., co-founder John Martin tapped a firkin of the Batch No. 1 that current brewmaster Rodger Davis dry-hopped and aged for a beer that was both historical and modern.
Founders, and original brewers, John and Reid Martin, with their latest brewer, Rodger Davis, toasted the first 25 years with a beer bridging the past, the present and their future.
John Martin with Shaun O’Sullivan, Reid Martin, Homer Smith (owner of the local homebrew shop, Oak Barrel, where the Martins bought all the ingredients for their first batch in 1985), and longtime beer salesman Ed Chainey.
Congratulations to John and Reid Martin. I hope to try the next anniversary beer 25 years from now.
Our 50th Session — The Big Five-0 — is a monumental one and our host, Alan from A Good Beer Blog, is tackling it with appropriate seriousness, especially considering it’s on April Fool’s Day. He’s chosen as his topic How Do They Make Me Buy Their Beer? Alan elaborates:
What makes you buy someone’s beer? Elemental. Multi-faceted. Maybe even interesting.
- Buying beer. I mean takeaway. From the shelf to you glass. What rules are dumb? Who gives the best service? What does good service mean to you? Please avoid “my favorite bar references” however wonderful. I am not talking about taverns as the third space. Unless you really really need to and contextualize it into the moment of transaction at the bar. If you can crystallize that moment of “yes” when the bartender is, in fact, tender go for it.
- What doesn’t work? What fad or ad turned you off what had previously been turned on about some beer’s appeal? When does a beer jump the shark? When does a beer store fail or soar? When does a brewery lose your pennies or earn your dimes?
- Go micro rather than macro. You may want to explore when you got tired of “extreme” or “lite” or “Belgian-style” but think about it in terms of your relationship with one brewery rather than some sort of internet wave of slag … like that ever happens.
- What is the most you paid for a great beer? More importantly – because this is not about being negative – what is the least? I don’t mean a gift. What compels you you to say this is the quality price ratio (“QPR”) that works best for you? When does a beer scream “you would have paid 27% more for me but you didn’t need to!”?
So pull out your wallet. Stare at it. What beer makes you open it up and throw down your hard-earned cash? Then tell the world what it is for the next Session on Friday, April 1. No fooling.
