Port Brewing / The Lost Abbey will holding their first ever Carnevale di Lost Abbey on Groundhog Day, February 2 from 6 to 10 p.m. to celebrate the Venetian holiday with a masquerade ball and new beer release, appropriately named Carnevale Ale. The beer will be the Lost Abbey’s interpretation of a saison, but made with American hops.
From the press release:
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I stopped by Lagunitas Brewing Friday afternoon to see the new brewhouse that I’d heard they’re in the process of installing. They’re in week three of a nine-week installation of a new 80-barrel system from a German company, ROLEC Prozess-und Brautechnik GmbH, along with many new pieces of equipment. Peter Moroskow and his team, who also recently installed new breweries at both Stone Brewing and Victory Brewing, had taken over the place and there were miles of pipes and other equipment everywhere, with blueprints dotting the walls and a Bavarian flag hanging overhead.
The Bavarian flag hanging from above, with just a fraction of the pipe remaining on the floor below.
For more photos of brewing equipment being installed at Lagunitas, visit the photo gallery.
January 18th was the first of the Beer Chef’s beer dinners for 2008, and featured the beers of Pelican Pub & Brewery in Pacific City, Oregon. Brewmaster Darron Welch was on hand to talk about his beers. Three times Pelican Pub & Brewery has been named brewpub of the year at the Great American Beer Festival.
Pelican Pub brewmaster Darron Welch with the beer chef Bruce Paton.
For more photos from the Pelican Pub Beer Dinner, visit the photo gallery.
Exactly one month from today, the 20th Anniversary Party for the Celebrator Beer News will take place at the Oakland Convention Center / Marriot Hotel. This should be a terrific climax to Beerapalooza week in the Bay Area. A lot of the attending breweries are either making something special just for the party or bringing something very unique. As a result, there will be a number of beers you simply can’t get anywhere else or at least are very difficult to find, especially all in one place. I know a number of other Celebrator writers will be in town for the event. If you’ve been to a Celebrator party in the past, this one is in a bigger space and will have far more different beers than ever before. This should easily be the one party ot to miss in 2008. I’ll see you there!
From the website:
The Celebrator Beer News will celebrate its 20th anniversary on February 17, 2008, with a Mardi Gras themed party from 4 to 8 pm at the Oakland Convention Center / Marriot Hotel, in Oakland, California.
More than 35 breweries will pour favorite brews. Meet Celebrator founders Bret and Julie Nickels along with Celebrator staff, writers and beer industry luminaries including pioneer figures in the craft beer movement. Cajun/Creole food catered by the Marriott Hotel, music from Dixieland Jazz and Zydeco bands and beer are included along with a souvenir Belgian-style glass! Breweries pouring will include some of the top breweries in the country.
Brewing memorabilia, special bottles and other items will be available to bid on at a silent auction benefiting the California Small Brewers Association. All profits from this event go to the CSBA to further the interests of the brewing community.
Tickets are on sale now at $55 per person which includes the banquet catered by the Marriott Hotel, nearly 200 different beers (some specially produced for this event), music and souvenir glass.
A Media-VIP session starts one hour early and will feature special limited production beers. VIP tickets are $80. The event takes place one day after the start of the Barleywine Festival at the Toronado in San Francisco!
Prizes for best Mardi Gras costumes! Discount rooms will be available at the Marriott Hotel at the Convention Center ($109 per night). Call 510-451-4000 and ask for the Celebrator rate. Take BART to the 12th Street station right in front of the Marriott Hotel.
For more information, call 510-538-2739. Ticket sales by Visa/MC, phone 800-430-BEER or purchase tickets below with PayPal’s secure ordering process. Mail checks to Celebrator, 20th Party, P.O. Box 375, Hayward, CA 94543.
General Admission $55 VIP Entry $80
2.17
Celebrator Beer News 20th Anniversary Party
Oakland Convention Center / Marriot Hotel, 1001 Broadway, Oakland, California
510.538.BREW or 888.430.BEER [ website ]
Last night I attended a lovely little beer dinner in my neck of the woods, at the beautifully situated Horizons restaurant in Sausalito. It was a four course affair, plus hors d’ouerves, paired with five Lagunitas beers. The night was clear and we had a fantastic view across the bay of the twinkling lights of the San Francisco night skyline. The food and pairings were terrific, too.
Ron Lindenbusch, from Lagunitas Brewing, with Dean Biersch (on right) with Lynn, the chef at Hopmonk Tavern, his new venture in Sebastopol which is slated to open this spring.
Also, there will be another Lagunitas beer dinner, next Wednesday, January 23. That one will take place at the Pleasanton Hotel and will begin at 7:00 p.m. This dinner will be five courses and the cost will be $50 per person.
For more photos from the Lagunitas beer dinner at Horizon’s, visit the photo gallery.
This Chronicle article comes to me via a local political blog, The Left Coaster, which curiously is also the name of the regular column I write for the Ale Street News, which in turn is located on the other coast.
Matier and Ross’ column today, The Bay Area could be the Clinton-Obama decider, contains this bit of wisdom from long-time state pollster Mark DiCamillo, dividing democratic voting patterns according to one’s preference for beer or wine.
I’m not exactly sure what to make of that. You’d have to search far and wide to find someone more liberal than myself, I’m reasonably well-educated, but I definitely would prefer to pair that cheese with beer. After all, the notion that wine and cheese work well together is really just a myth. And frankly, either candidate on those labels is pretty scary looking. |
Not surprisingly, most of my friends are like-minded, so either DiCamillo is way off the mark or more probably, I’m so far removed from the pulse of the people that I don’t even register. I’m most likely the guy in their 2% plus or minus margin for error, so rarely do I agree with any of the choices polls usually offer. For example I’m not particularly wild about either Clinton or Obama, and think our media is doing its usual disservice to society by so nakedly picking sides so early in the campaign process. All the candidates are supposed to get equal time, but because they cover only who they want to and who they decide are the front-runners, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that subverts the very idea of a democracy.
But enough proof that I’m on the fringe, is DiCamillo suggesting that the more liberal and/or educated one is, the more likely that person is to prefer wine over beer? With Sonoma and Napa Counties, along with several others, so close to the Bay Area, it’s no surprise that we’re awash in wine lovers. But perhaps DiCamillo is unaware that this same area, the San Francisco Bay Area, might also be the second most important region in the country for craft beer. And the demographic that most frequently goes for craft beer? You guessed it; liberal and educated. Of course, craft beer drinkers are only a fraction of the total beer picture (though in the Bay Area we’re well above the national average) but doesn’t cheap table and box wine sell pretty well, too? And lets not ignore the many people who enjoy both beer and wine.
My only point in all of this is to ponder whether or not the traditional stereotype of beer as blue-collar and wine as white-collar might not be as true as it once was (if indeed it really ever was true), and especially when applied to craft beer? Better beer seems to cut across class lines to a great extent, at least it seems to me that you see all stratas of people at beer festivals, beer dinners and the like.
According to Ross and Matier, “[t]he big showdown between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could come down to California’s ‘beer-drinking Democrats’ versus its ‘wine and cheese’ liberals — with the Bay Area playing a pivotal role in the outcome.” I’m not sure about those labels, they just seem a bit outdated and too simple-minded for my tastes.
The Marin Institute, one of the more blunt and churlish of the anti-alcohol organizations, is mounting an offensive to raise alcohol taxes an incredible “25 cents per drink” in California. Their vision — my nightmare — is to bring about “communities free of the alcohol industry’s negative influence and an alcohol industry that does not harm the public’s health.” But as they naturally see any influence as negative and everything that the alcohol industry does as harmful, what they really want is nothing short of an another Prohibition.
Throughout their rhetoric (and even the sources they’re relying upon) is a call for “fairness” and for alcohol to pay its “fair share,” whatever that really means. But the carrot they’re holding out is that by doing so it would help to alleviate California’s budget deficit that’s been plaguing us for several years now. But I fail to see how raising the taxes of people who drink is in any way fair. Effectively what they’re suggesting is that because our state managed to get itself in a fix, budget-wise, people who drink should be called upon to foot the bill. They just want to punish those of us who choose to drink, and yet they call it fair? The first definition (of 26) for the word “fair” is “free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice.” There’s clearly bias, it’s dishonest in my opinion to claim it’s because of our state’s tax problems, and it hardly seems just to have drinkers pay a disproportionate share to get us out of our budget hole. So it’s really the very opposite of fair.
This is the same nonsense that’s going on with Indian gaming right now, with several state proposals on November’s ballot. We committed genocide against Native Americans and broke every single treaty we ever made. So when Indian gaming successfully exploited one of the few advantages left to them, we still can’t seem to let them be. This is the second time California politicians have tried to get (or more accurately extort) a bigger piece of their gambling revenues, and the exponents of these propositions try to sell them in the same way as the Marin Institute is doing with beer taxes, by twisting the idea of “fairness.”
Of course, the real reason they can say with a straight face that it’s fair to ask drinkers to pay more taxes than teetotalers is this odd notion that, in the words of David Leonhardt, “taxes serve a purpose beyond merely raising general government revenue. Taxes on a given activity are also supposed to pay the costs that activity imposes on society.” I’m not necessarily against this idea entirely, but I don’t understand when it became an unquestionable fait accompli and why people are so quick to believe it. Why is this only ever said of things that some people don’t like? The costs on society for our general obesity and unhealthiness has not brought about taxes on fast food, sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Hummers, SUVs and other similar gas-guzzling vehicles not only are not taxed at a higher rate but actually receive federal and state tax breaks and incentives and have lower standards of fuel efficiency than regular cars. With their poor MPG they do great harm to our society yet are actively subsidized and encouraged by our government over cars that get more miles per gallon and are kinder to the planet. Check out this Slate article for more on this. I’m not saying that’s as it should be, simply that this idea that all products must contain within their profit structure some tax scheme that balances the price with their damage to society caused by them is wholly fallacious.
But even if it wasn’t such a weak argument, we don’t charge a higher percentage of a person’s tax burden for the fire department if they live in a tinderbox house vs. an inflammable brick home. Instead we average the cost to society out and charge everyone the same amount since everyone gets the same potential benefit. That’s a fair arrangement in every sense of the word. It’s good for the whole town, not just for you, if your house does not burn down. So there’s really no reason why we can’t apply that same logic to the whole of society. I realize that will be unpopular with folks who don’t think it’s fair that while they choose to abstain, they may have to pay for problems supposedly caused my decision to drink. But if it’s legal for everyone who pays taxes (except, those 18-20 years old — hey, another reason they should be allowed) to drink then I don’t see why it’s so troubling that we all share the costs of society equally. You may think it’s unfair because you feel you’re not causing the (hypothetical) problem. Well I think you’re being selfish by only wanting to pay for services that that either benefit you or were caused by you. In a sense, it’s like after building your inflammable brick house you refuse to pay to support the fire department any longer under the theory that your house is in order.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is so selfish that they don’t want to help other people. Look at this another way. The vast majority of drinkers do so in moderation and never are any burden to society whatsoever. But a tiny percentage of drinkers do cause problems for themselves and others. There are at least two ways we can shape policy to deal with problem drinkers. We can treat the causes of the problems and make tougher laws to deal with them, and only them. Or we can make it harder on everybody’s ability to drink, thus punishing everybody for the sins of the few. It’s not too difficult to figure out which approach the neo-prohibitionists have chosen. Even if only one in every ten-thousand persons who drink may exact a cost on society they would prefer to punish the other 9,999, too.
Another one of the contentions is that the last time California raised taxes on alcohol was 1992. That increase was apparently one cent on a glass of wine and two pennies for a bottle or can of beer and one shot of hard liquor. So clearly a 25-cent increase seems reasonable?!? Maybe sixteen years is too long without an increase, I’m not going to argue that point. But even if the tax had been raised another penny every year, the tax would still only be 16 cents higher today, so please tell me how 25 cents is a fair suggestion? Or are they just shooting for the moon in the hopes of a negotiation that ends up compromising higher as a result?
And if it’s tax fairness they’re after, taxes of corporations have fallen much more dramatically over the past several decades. They haven’t just stagnated and gone down merely by adjusting for inflation, but have actively been lowered. At the same time, personal taxes on the poor and middle-class have gone up while tax cuts for the rich keep increasing. So if the Marin Institute really cares about California’s budget crisis, I think a more prudent approach might be trying to raise corporate taxes across the board and removing unfair tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthiest among us. It wasn’t alcohol that got us into this mess, so why make it foot the bill.
One of the main sources that the Marin Institute cites for their proposal is Let’s Raise a Glass to Fairness, a polemic about why the author, David Leonhardt, believes federal alcohol taxes should be raised. Some of the supposed alcohol-related costs to society he cites are the following:
So let’s look at those claims.
1. Child Abuse: This one’s a head-scratcher for me. Sure it sounds bad, but what does it really mean? I was terrorized as a child by an alcoholic, psychotic step-father but even as a kid I knew it wasn’t the alcohol that caused him to be that way. There were myriad things in his life that made my step-father such a mess, and alcohol was the least of them. At its worst it was merely a convenient catalyst. If alcohol had been removed from the situation, something else would have filled the void. I can’t see how alcohol causes child abuse any more than cake is directly responsible for obesity.
2. Drunken-Driving Checkpoints: If these are such a burden to our nation’s purse strings, then by all means stop them. They’re already an invasion of civil liberties because they randomly presume guilt of everyone behind the wheel of a vehicle. But saying these are a cost of alcohol seems weird to me. The fact is that police forces choose to do them, they aren’t mandatory, and they’re more often done because of politics or pressure from local neo-prohibitionist groups. So they aren’t caused by alcohol, they’re caused by people against alcohol. There are plenty of legitimate ways for the police to do their job in keeping potentially dangerous drivers off the road that don’t involve these checkpoints.
3. Economic Loss Caused by Death and Injury: Now I certainly don’t want to downplay or make light of anyone’s loss or injury, but the alcohol didn’t cause either. The idiot person who drank too much or otherwise couldn’t control himself is responsible for a death or injury that resulted from his actions. And he should be punished to the full extent of the law. But don’t punish me or my right to drink moderately because some yahoo couldn’t act responsibly.
4. Hospital Bills for Alcohol-related Accidents: This is the same as the last one, it’s economic harm inflicted by a person and we should be blaming the individual person. People scoff at the Twinkie defense, saying it’s ridiculous that too much sugar might cause a person to commit a crime, but here Leonhardt is saying effectively the same thing.
He also throws around a lot of statistics about how many people die each year in “alcohol-related car accidents” along with “other accidents, assaults or illnesses in which alcohol plays a major role.” But as we learn time and time again, the way “alcohol-related” is defined is usually pretty deceptive. Many such studies have considered an accident “alcohol-related” if one of the passengers had earlier been drinking so it’s pretty hard to take such stats very seriously. Do people die from causes related to alcohol? I’m sure they do. But the number one cause of death: living. What I mean by that is every single thing we do every single moment has some risk associated with it. It’s a fool’s errand to dissect every thing we humans do and determine which ones to tax more heavily.
Leonhardt likens his strategy to the same argument for higher tobacco taxes, saying for alcohol the impetus “is even stronger” with this gem. “Tobacco kills many more people than alcohol, but it mainly kills those who use the product.” Did I miss a meeting? Isn’t one of the strongest reasons for all the recent tobacco bans that second-hand smoke is far more dangerous to people around smokers than previously believed?
He then goes on to say. “Many alcohol victims are simply driving on the wrong road at the wrong time.” And that may be true, and it is certainly tragic, but why then is it fair that I should pay more for my beer because of other drunk drivers, especially if I and millions of other responsible drinkers don’t place anyone else at risk. If the argument for fairness is that all alcohol drinkers should pay more for their beer because of the costs that alcohol exacts on society, how then does that same logic explain why this burden is so unfairly placed on all drinkers and not just the problem drinkers? Isn’t that just a teensy-weensy bit hypocritical?
Leonhardt later admits, or at least accepts, that there are plenty of responsible drinkers around and even quotes Jeff Becker, President of the Beer Institute. “Most people — the vast majority of consumers — don’t impose any additional costs on anyone.” But in the end he concludes that since he can’t figure out a way to “tax only those people who were going to drive drunk in the future” then it’s somehow fairer to just tax everybody who drinks. Yeah, that makes sense. No wonder the Marin Institute loves this guy.
But another flaw in this theory is that raising taxes on alcohol will raise an additional $3 billion in tax revenue to help with California’s $14 billion current deficit. One of the major prongs of the Marin Institutes’s plan is that by raising the price of beer, drinking will be curtailed once again. If people are drinking less, then how will that result in more tax revenues? If this proposal was really about solving California’s budget crisis, wouldn’t it make more sense to raise alcohol taxes and then actively encourage drinking to help raise more money to apply to the deficit? But this never really was about taxes or California’s budget crisis. It was always about keeping people from drinking or at least making it harder for them to do so. But not enough people were apparently getting their message and were — gasp — still enjoying a drink now and again. So instead they dressed this proposal up as a panacea for our state’s budget crisis hoping that people might respond more favorably to that gambit. Don’t you believe it.
Look, we have the highest federal budget deficit in history and many states, including my own, have similarly terrible fiscal situations that they’re facing. But no matter how much junk science you throw at this problem, alcohol did not cause our current situation. As a result, trying to raise more taxes by arguing that it would be fairer for the nation’s alcohol drinkers to help pick up the tab is just ludicrous. Perhaps taxes should be higher across the board to get us out of this deficit and that might include alcohol taxes, too. But politicians don’t like to raise taxes generally because people tend to vote out of office any politician who tries to do so, no matter how vital they might be in paying for our infrastructure and making our society work for everyone. So we keep electing fiscal conservatives who slash and burn social programs. And then we wonder why there’s no unemployment available when we get laid off so that the factory we used to work for can relocate overseas and chain ten-year old girls to a sewing machine to slave away for twelve-hour days, seven days-a-week for peanuts just so we can be spared the injustice of paying a few cents more for some crap we don’t really need at Wal-Mart. Let’s not change that situation, let’s blame alcohol instead. Raise a glass to fairness, indeed. I’ll buy the first round.
According to Renewable Energy Access, an online newsletter focusing on renewable energy, Sierra Nevada Brewing “has commissioned the first phase of what will be one of the country’s largest private solar installations. This commissioning comes on the heels of the installation of four 250-kilowatt co-generation fuel cell power units, also one of the largest fuel cell installations in the United States.”
They already produce some of their own energy with their 1-MW fuel cell plant. With the addition of this new project, which should be completed some time later this year, they will be close to owner Ken Grossman’s stated “goal of providing 100% of our energy needs with clean on-site alternative energy generation.”
On January 11th, 21st Amendment Brewery broke out the good stuff for a very special beer dinner. It was a five-course dinner, plus amuse bouche (which are essentially smaller sized hors d’œuvre, the name comes from nouvelle cuisine). For beer, owners Shaun O’Sullivan and Nico Freccia dipped deep into their beer cellar, pulling out their own beers from years past, beers picked up during their travels as well as beer given to them by visiting brewers. Only twenty guests were permitted to purchase tickets to the dinner, primarily because many of the beers were in small supply. The brewer’s loft, situated on the mezzanine level in the back overlooking the general seating area below, was the setting for the event. One large rectangular table with a white tablecloth with 24 place settings was the only table in the room. As a result, the dinner had the feel of a large cocktail party in a friend’s home. Throughout the evening, bottles of beer from the library were selected on the spot to pair which each course with no fewer than a half-dozen different beers that could be sampled with each new dish. The price per person was $120, which given the quality of the food and the sheer variety, diversity and uniqueness of the beers was a bargain. When you consider that one of the beers of the evening was Wesvleteren 8, it was a steal. The food was terrific, the company engaging and lively, and the beer heavenly.
Shaun O’Sullivan holds a bottle of 2000 Cantillon Gueuze that he hand-carried home from Brussels, after a trip he and I took to Cantillon last year.
For more photos from the 21st Amendment Brewer’s Library Dinner, visit the photo gallery.
I’m not entirely convinced of their claim of combating global warming, but Anderson Valley Brewing announced that they have begun brewing real ales and have added a beer engine to their tasting room, and that’s certainly good enough news for me.
From the press release:
Anderson Valley Brewing Company (AVBC) proudly added to their award-winning line of handcrafted beers, “Real ale”—a natural ale created in a traditional and environmentally-friendly style. Real ale is a beer that highlights Anderson Valley Brewing Company’s continuing efforts to make high quality beers in an environmentally responsible manner. Real ale is:
- * A truly “organic” ale with only four natural ingredients: malted barely, hops, water and yeast and absolutely no additives.
- * Served at 10-13 C degrees via a human-powered “hand pull” it’s naturally cool, resulting in far less energy being used for cooling.
- * Naturally carbonated through the yeast’s effervescence — no additional carbon dioxide is added.
- * Reducing packaging by using casks which can be reused for up to 20 years.
- * Created using solar power which provides 40% of Anderson Valley Brewing Company’s annual energy needs.
Though Real ale is environmentally responsible, the traditional method of brewcrafting also results in a more robust, stimulating, and fresh taste that can’t be found in traditional brands. Real ale’s unique flavors and aromas are partly due to the process of fermentation.
While a great many breweries remove yeast before the beer reaches the glass, Real ale differentiates itself by retaining the yeast in the container from which the beer is served. Though the yeast settles at the bottom of the cask and isn’t poured into the glass, the yeast is still active in the cask where the process of fermentation continues until ready to serve. Real ale is currently available in Anderson Valley Brewing Company’s visitor’s center.
In other Anderson Valley news, they will be having a special event on February 2 to celebrate their 20th Anniversary. And the 12th annual Boonville Beer Festival will take place in 2008 on May 10.